Then She was Gone

 

I sat down to share a few thoughts and began searching for a photo, unsure if anything would be right. Then I found this previously unnoticed one, so fitting it felt almost prophetic. Leave it to Jess. If this little essay had a title, it might be “Then She Was Gone.”

It’s been eleven months since Jess died, and grief has changed its shape. It used to arrive like a storm that flattened everything, a noise I couldn’t turn off. Now it slips in quietly and stands beside ordinary things, and that quiet is its own kind of loud.

There’s a wastebasket in her room I still haven’t emptied. It’s ridiculous, a little woven guard at the door of a life. I walk past it and feel it staring back: “Someday you’re going to have to do this.” My head knows that day won’t make her more gone; my heart isn’t convinced. As long as a tissue corner or a crumpled tag is still where she left it, some strand remains uncut. The wastebasket is not trash; it’s like a sentence she started that I’m not ready to finish.

In the refrigerator, I found a jar of pesto that had drifted past its use-by date, the exact brand Jess loved. I threw it away like jumping off a cliff with no stepping down, just air and fear. And then almost immediately, I bought a new jar. It’s absurd, I know. But the thought of not having her favorite sauce feels completely wrong.

I have an eyeglass case from our trip to New York. Every time I slide my glasses in, I remember that she was there when I chose this. We stood in those busy streets, ate street dogs, and saw shows. Eleven months later, it’s not the skyline I remember; it’s the mundane purchase on a day that reminds me she was here in that place.

What I fear most now is the creep of becoming Jessless: the moment an everyday object no longer carries any trace of her because it has been replaced, washed, or simply lived past. The toothbrush I’ve already thrown away. The shampoo that’s been used up. One day, I’ll throw out or wash the last thing with her fingerprints on it, and I won’t know it was the last until later.

But grief is tricky; it sneaks new paths in. I still find evidence of her in places she never physically touched. Like how a thrifted shirt catches my eye because she would have said, “That one,” her voice a smile. I still come across bits of her old life. She was the kind of person who left a trail of projects, crochet starting chains, a spool of thread, a piece of ribbon coiled on a dresser like a sleeping cat.

There’s a story the world tries to sell: time will help you “move on.” I don’t find that story helpful. I am moving, yes, because days have a way of happening to you whether you vote yes or no. But I am not moving on. I’m moving with. With an armload of ordinary artifacts, an empty jar, a wastebasket, and a pocket where I still expect to find her hair tie. They have all become sacred because they are proof that she was here.

People talk about closure as if it were a door you get to lock, but my house has open windows. Every breeze can bring her in: the smell of basil, a student parking lot full of laughter, a fabric store, the sound of scissors. Some days it’s unbearable; other days it’s the breath I needed. The difference between then and now is this: I let the breeze move through. I don’t brace quite as hard. I have learned how to brace and breathe at the same time.

I tell myself that one day I will empty the wastebasket. When that day comes, it won’t be erasure; it will be an act of tending, like pruning a plant she would have wanted to thrive. Until then, I let it be. It’s not a failure to move forward; it’s a boundary my heart knows is kind. Eleven months in, grief lives mostly in the small things, and the small kindness of hearing her name is still the biggest help.