When I think of Charlie, she is with me

Anyone who loses someone close to them has to find a way to live with and through their grief.

Part of me at times has wished my memories could be wiped so that I wouldn’t have to live through the loss of Charlie. If I could just forget she was ever here, my pain would disappear. In reality, a) that could never happen and b) I don’t really want to forget one of the best things that ever happened to me, as painful as it can be.

Over the past eight months, I have been on a quest to find happiness again. I have needed, just like anyone after a traumatic loss, to learn how to breathe again, how to live in a new normal that I absolutely hate. I have needed to learn how not to hate my new normal. I am still on that quest and I am documenting the journey through my blog, with a view to one day writing a book.

Now anyone who has or will walk a path like mine will make choices about what to believe, how to process, how to behave, and what to change or keep the same. No one journey is the same as any other. What works for me may not work for you. But I share my story in the knowledge that the experience of loss is universal and in the hope that some of what I have learned may be helpful to someone else… which leads me to my latest revelation.

I realized recently that my beautiful girl isn’t really gone, only in a corporeal sense. I can’t see Charlie but I just have to think of her and she is right there with me.

I also realized that Charlie wants, and perhaps even needs, me to let her go, to release my regrets and shattered dreams, to understand that she is happy where she is. This world wasn’t good enough for her. The only people I have known who died young were extra special. They were kinder, more empathetic, and more beautiful in every way than most of us. They were too precious for this world.

When I look at the wall of certificates she received from school, I am reminded of how exceptional Charlie was. There are awards for kindness, originality, and teamwork, among others. In one of her last journal entries, she wrote that she had received 100% in what would be her last English assignment, “which was obviously bullshit pity from my teacher because I'm so pathetic”. Yet 100% was what she deserved. She wasn’t pathetic. She was brilliant.

Charlie was one of the best people I have ever known, better than me to be sure. She still is the best. She is shining somewhere beyond our material realms. Hopefully one day I will see her again. But, in the meantime, I will think of her and know that she is right here with me when I do.