leaving brings the lonely

'You’ll get over it…' It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. 

To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. 

You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. 

The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never loses. How could it? 

The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. 

This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?
— Jeanette Winterson

On December 14th, one of the best friends I've ever had, was killed.
It was a story heard around the world.
I know this because before I actually got the call from our good friend in New York that Suzanne had left this universe, an unread email sat in my inbox from a friend in Germany who had heard the 'news'.  And it's 'news' in semi-quotes because it actually was news, the kind you instantly hear about on the radio and the kind that's played on the TV.  And while it feels like there's a hole in me that sometimes feels as if it's filling up with the 'news' and I'm about to drown,  it's also the part that keeps her memory alive and talked about by people that never even knew her but now wish they had.  And that's the part that is both strange and wonderful.  Two things I never thought I'd feel about someone's death.
I've never been through it this closely.
maybe it's age.   maybe it's awareness.
      Or maybe it's awareness that comes with age.

I've struggled with writing about her and not writing about her.  Wanting to explain just how much she means to me.  I'm not sure I can put into words...
With Suzanne, I was vulnerable.  I hate being vulnerable, as much as I hate getting a shot.  With Suzanne, I couldn't even feel it.  It turns out, I realize in these days without it now, I relied on her sense of humor, her incredibly quick wit, her total interest in others, and a level of acceptance that was unparalleled in any other person I've known.   

This would make her laugh.
Everything I just wrote, she'd laugh self-deprecatingly and say, "yeah, right."
And that's been the hardest part of this whole thing:  Knowing I'll never hear her voice in this world again.  I talk to her every single day, hearing her voice in my head so clearly, but some days the realization that I won't hear her laughter ring out, makes me gasp with fear.
I found this world easier with her in it.
And everyone I know that knew her felt exactly the same way.
      That's a really goddamn big loss.

And while denial can't be totally healthy for long, it feels,
rationally so,
that it's incredibly disrespectful to admit or even to accept that she's actually gone.
So, for now at least, I'm pretending she's not.
That may seem the strange part.

And yet, the incredibly wonderful part is that, in reality, Suzanne lives on in the big apple,
a place we both loved completely and completely lived for;
her name placed in Central Park on a bench for you and yours to rest on
and a tree for you to be shaded by.

That's just the way she is.