I thought of grief today...

Grief is such an odd thing to me.

Yes an emotion,

yes a memory,

yes an event,

yes a physical ache.

So a "thing" is really the only way I can describe it.

It is water one day, soothing your insides with memory of a loved one that used to be.

Then ice the next moment freezing any hope you had in your heart that today would be less painful.

That at least for today, you wouldn't want to join them.

I met death when I was 12 years old at my cousin's wake.

He was 21 years old.

My aunt Cecilia stood by his casket, carefully combing her fingers through his blonde hair.

I was terrified, stuck to my chair facing the casket.

My aunt saw me, saw the terror and waved me over.

As she thread her fingers heartbreakingly slow through her son's hair, she whispered, "When you touch his hair, it is as if he is still here."

I think that was the saddest sentence I had ever heard, and to this day I think the same can be true.

Because hair is dead, it has always been the most unalive thing about humans, and yet it was not cold marble when you touched it.

It was, as she put it so simply, "... as if he [was] still here."