Life will really kill you sometimes.

You think you have it all lined up in your nice little plan,

then the kind faced doctor looks at you

and whispers his harsh truth in a voice of pained empathy.

Everyone says you handle it well,

that it will get better with time and with healing.

And I suppose that’s true to some extent,

wounds can’t bleed forever.

The scab will form on your heart and do its magic.

When the flowers are all long dead and the sympathetic greeting cards

stop arriving in the mail and the phone finally stops ringing,

there is the awful silence of her absence,

and all the thousands of reminders of her.

Where she sat, the smell of her on her clothes,

her bathrobe hanging on the hook,

 and all that she left behind.

Every breath hurts for a while,

every day seems like the same bad movie

repeating itself as if on an endless loop of tape,

on and on and on,

over and over and over.

We all have to listen to the doctors explain

why things are the way they are,

eventually.