THE 16 LESSONS • LESSON 1
You Can’t Imagine It Until You’re Living It
You can know your person is going to die. You can grieve what’s coming. You can even think you’re preparing yourself. But nothing prepares you for what it feels like when they’re actually gone.
I knew Dave was going to die. I had time to anticipate the loss, to grieve what was coming, and to believe that somehow I was preparing myself for it.
I wasn’t. You can’t.
Anticipatory grief was real, but it was nothing like the grief that came after Dave died. There was simply no way to understand the enormity of losing my person until I was living it.
One day my friend Nora said to me, “I can’t imagine what you’re going through.” She was exactly right. She couldn’t imagine it. Neither could I—until it happened to me.
