cakewalk.

The door didn't give, initially.

I pushed against it and was instantly terrified that I would find her, crumpled on the floor.

This is what I've come to expect, on instinct.

To find a body, somewhere, when it doesn't seem to go right.

Which means that you have made it into my blood.

As I returned to bed last night, it hit me.

This is what I was spared.

Your dad took the hit for me on finding your body.

Because we ended, your father now has an image burned in his memory that would have otherwise been mine.

Had we stayed together - if things had gone the way I'd planned, and we'd been married - that would have been me.

And that's something I'm not sure I'd ever have been able to recover from.

Finding you, seeing you would have fortified the guilt, would have magnified it into something undeniable, irrefutable, inescapable to my mind.

It would have been the image.

That's what would have sealed me off.

It would have been me taking your limp body in my arms, and holding you, and crying over you, to no effect.

I was saved.

I was saved from hell in California by your death.

I was saved from an even greater grief when you left me, a year before.

The first loss of you was a great pain, but your death was the greatest pain.

And yet you saved me from something even worse.

And for that, for the gauntlet you have put me through, I must stop, and say thank you.

The priest had said, "Remember these stages of grief; the shock, the despair, the anger, the tears. Think about them as you're processing them, and write them down, so that when it happens again, you can be prepared."

When it happens again...

Your death is the benchmark against which all other pains will be measured.

Not this pain from that, and not that pain from this.

Not the loss of him, not the death of her, not the end of yet another, not the disappointment from yet another failed relationship...

It hurts, and I hate to think of those around me hurting, but I don't hurt as much, after you.

It is all a grazing.

A glimmer.

A deflection off the surface of my chest that doesn't get absorbed, except in the rare moments when it does, and then I am sick with grief.

And even then, it is a pin-drop in the deafening sound of your absence.

(But I'm also not asking for a challenge.)

For that, I must say thank you.

If I can survive your death, then everything else is a cakewalk.

She passed away this morning.

I'm concerned for my mom, and her pain hurts me, but the fact of it doesn't hurt.

Everything else compared to you is a cakewalk.