WYG Prompt: What I have loved I cannot hold

Prompt: What I have loved I cannot hold. What lies around me I cannot leave.

What I have loved, I cannot hold. So many losses over the years: pets, family members, friends, dreams, ambitions, goals… I can think of 20 significant losses in my life, just off the top of my head. All of those losses combined cannot touch the pain of losing Doug. And I cannot hold him. I can hold the box with his cremains; 210 pounds of flesh, blood, sinew, bone, warmth, kindness, strength, love; they’ve all been reduced to a few pounds of ashes. I can hold the cards and gifts he gave me over the years. I can hold the memories. I can hold photographs. I can hold the things that he wore or read or used or ate. But I cannot hold him, and no amount of holding the remnants of our life together is enough. No memory or photograph or card or coffee mug can love me back. No Vols jersey can say, “I love you more every day,” as he often did.

What lies around me I cannot leave; not really, anyway. No matter where I go, the heartbreaks and the losses come with me. The damage from grief, much like the damage from radiation, is cumulative. Each loss combines with the ones before, causing more and more pain and loneliness. 

What is it that lies around me that I cannot leave? Only the total destruction of everything I am and everything I’ve been. I look around me and see nothing but the scattered, crushed wreckage of what could have been, should have been, almost was a wonderful life. But now it’s nothing, and it’s made me into nothing as well. I wake up, I do things, but it’s all going through the motions. I’m here, but not really.

Why can’t I leave what lies around me? Well, I could, actually. Except that the only way I could do so is socially unacceptable, and getting professional assistance to do so quickly and painlessly is illegal. Because we have freedom, but not the freedom to choose to move on when our lives are over; and mine absolutely is.

If I cannot hold what I have loved, and I cannot leave what lies around me, then where does that leave me? With empty hands, a ravaged heart, and future so bleak that The Handmaid’s Tale looks like the feel-good show of the century in comparison.