Grief rarely arrives alone.
It weaves itself in layers—
the personal with the collective,
the intimate with the distant.
It comes through headlines.
It comes through the quiet collapse of love.
Until the heart can no longer tell
which ache belongs to the world
and which belongs only to us.
Lately, I have been carrying both.
A voice once burning with courage,
gone.
A love I thought would anchor me,
unraveled.
Both leave me in tears.
One, when I hear words
that will never be spoken again.
The other, when a photograph appears
and the silence cuts deeper than sound.
Different losses—
yet they echo.
Both remind me
how fragile life is.
Both whisper the same question:
How do we go on
when what gave us strength
is no longer here?
But grief does not only take.
It hollows us out, yes—
but in the hollow,
something expands.
Tears are not weakness.
They are proof—
that I can still feel,
still love,
still carry fire in a world
that keeps trying to put it out.
So this is my marker:
yes, the world feels emptier.
yes, my life feels lonelier.
But grief will not silence me.
For even in breaking,
truth emerges.
We honor what is gone
not just with mourning,
but with the way we live forward.
Loss teaches me this:
my fire,
my love,
my courage—
must not be buried
with what I have lost.
Hellènic Muse 