Big Shoes

Sometimes it’s right afterward.

Sometimes you just went through it and there’s nothing left to feel sad about. The ache isn’t as sharp, the loss isn’t so profound. You just end up a little better than you were yesterday. This is the new normal.

Sometimes it’s a year or so later when you thought you were good. You thought enough time had passed that it had to be healed. You go to the kitchen or the garage or the car and you’ll think or hear something that opens up the floodgates of memory and it all washes over you like it was yesterday. It just rushes you and you’re not ready for it. You take a deep breath and try to hold it off but you can’t. It moves around your barriers and crashes into you and you can’t breathe. This is starting over.

Sometimes it’s not for years and years. When your daughter asks you a question you give a thoughtful answer to and in her you see yourself at six years old: inquisitive or silly or curious or just trying to talk to a grown up about something they can talk to you about.

You’ll do it without thinking about it.

Something in you is going to be exactly what the situation or question or curiosity called for right in that moment and you’ll see them appreciate what you’re saying or doing or trying to show them.

It’ll click and you’ll get to watch it happen.

In that moment – to them, anyway – you’re you and you’re just doing what you do.

But to YOU – you’ll know what it was to give that answer. To be that encouragement. To teach that lesson honestly and to do so just by being you.

You’ll take that opportunity to be what they were to you by remembering what they were to you.

If you're lucky it'll happen by accident. If you're deliberate about the example you set and the kind of influence you want to be this will be a natural state you just find yourself in.

It may never stop – the ache. That empty chair you can’t bring yourself to move to another room in the house but can’t look at anymore. You know it won’t stay empty forever but it’ll never be what it once was.

But when you get to be what they were to you, you get to remind yourself how they’re never really gone.