I used to believe that time softened pain. People said that grief faded, that it reshaped itself into something gentler, a quiet ache instead of a wound that never stopped bleeding. Maybe that was true for others. For me, grief simply changed masks. Some days it felt like exhaustion. Other days, it felt like anger. And on days like the fifth anniversary of my wife’s death, it felt like standing on the edge of a cliff, waiting for the world to shift beneath my feet. My wife, Lydia, had been gone for five years, and yet I still woke every morning reaching for the empty side of the bed as though instinct rather than memory guided my hand. I would turn, see the untouched pillow, and feel the familiar crack tighten through my chest. Some wounds simply learned to hide under the skin. Our daughter, Mara, was only thirteen when we lost her mother. She’s eighteen now, older in ways that had nothing to do with age, her gaze steadier than it should be for someone barely stepping into adulthood. She learned to carry her sorrow quietly, with the kind of composure only children of loss seem to understand. She didn’t talk about Lydia often, but now and then I caught a flicker in her eyes, a drop of grief she never shared aloud…….CONTINUE READING IN BELOW