After you left, we all leave but you left early, I cried. We all did. Only because we loved your company, the presence of your life. Even when you weren’t around we knew you were there, somewhere. Here, there … do you see how difficult it is to locate you now. I think you will always be here but I do not fully understand where here is. You did not always have to be in my presence to be here. Here is a place in the heart of my mind, where it hurts. Can we call that place soul? Can anyone ever leave there? What does it mean to leave? I know others I have loved who left but still remain here. The whole world is still out there but very little of it is here. I never doubt it is not there even though I only ever see a small part of it at a time. It shall be the same with you I think. Always. After you went towards away, afterwards, we found language had failed us. All these years of using it every day and then …

This is how it failed us. I want you to know how because then you may understand why the world went quiet after you left. It was strangely wordless. In the hour after we received news of your going the house was so quiet. We heard the fridge hum and I had never heard it hum that loud in daylight. I walked over to it to see if something was wrong. There was something wrong, but not with the fridge.

It fails me now as I struggle to shift letters into words into a form worthy of you and words simply cannot do that. But they are all I have. And we have a need to share these things, we humans. We want to get the words right. You are worth the effort and at some point I will cease the bending and reshaping of this imperfect language and hope they reach you somehow. Then we shall go back to being quiet and polish our memories of you. I think you will shine.

The memories we have of you only reach a certain point and then they stop. We were all counting on there being more. This is a normal expectation, please do not be angry with us for that. Anger will visit us all. We will feel cheated by your early departure. But then, how sad you must have felt. We are sorry. We wanted to be able to fix things, like the humming fridge. We wish you had hummed. Maybe you did but in the daylight and the noises that come with it, we did not hear. We are sorry. Sorry is the word we use when the pain rises in our chest and up into our lungs creating such pressure that the place where we keep our language shrinks and leaves only a few essentials, the residue of life. This is usually emitted as a low hushing sigh. It is more a sound than a word and we fear the sound of it because against the memory of you stretched like the sky around us it feels pitiful, banal. When you hear the sound please hear it as all the love we can gather in one place as an offering of ourselves to you.

The memory that lingers for me is a montage of moments. It is what all of our lives are destined to become,

and somehow these are greater than words. You taught us something of value, presence is a beautiful thing. When we are present we do not need words, Words come afterwards, and after words, there is the beautiful memory of presence.