Page 63 of Befriending the Bear
“Deal.”
We ended the call, and I stood in the stillness that followed, not empty like it used to be, but full. Quiet, but warm. Like tea steeping, like a voice waiting to be heard.
I opened my laptop and pulled up the short piece for the anthology I started over a year ago but had only had the title at the top:Life After Loss.Like with my memoir,I hadn’t been able to write anything else because I hadn’t been living. I’d been existing. Surviving.
After taking a deep breath and closing my eyes for a moment, I started to write, and once I did, the words poured out of me.
Moving on is the most overused expression when people talk about grief. They mean well when they tell you not to linger in your sadness but move on, but they never tell you how to do that. How do you keep moving when your whole world has fallen apart? How do you embrace the passage of time when you want it to freeze and even turn back?
Moving on, I’ve learned, isn’t about forgetting. It isn’t about “getting over it,” like grief is a puddle you can just hop across if you take a running start. Moving on is remembering how to live, even with the hollow still there. It’s making space at the table for the absence, but setting the table anyway. It’s letting the silence sit beside you without letting it swallow you whole.
After Marcus died, people stopped speaking his name. They tiptoed around it, like saying it would make my grief worse instead of easing my loneliness. But grief is not made heavier by memory. What made it unbearable was feeling like I was the only one still carrying him forward.
Grief isolates not because others don’t love you, but because their lives resume at a speed you can’t match. They return to routines, to emails and errands, while you remain tethered to the stillness left behind. It’s not their fault. It’s not yours either. But it can make the world feel like it’s speaking a language you’ve forgotten.
I learned to smile and nod, to say, “I’m doing okay,” when what I meant was, “I don’t know who I am without him.” But slowly, over months, then years, I carved out a new shape of myself—one molded not in spite of the loss, but around it.
Healing didn’t come in grand gestures or revelations. It came in small things: the first time the sun looked beautiful instead of cruel. The first laugh that didn’t feel like betrayal. The first morning I didn’t count the days since he was gone.
And eventually, the first time I let myself reach for someone new. Not because I stopped loving Marcus, but because I’d learned that love, too, is renewable.
It’s not a betrayal to keep walking, to move on, to find a life after loss. It’s the deepest form of honor.
I paused, blinking the sting from my eyes, and reread what I’d written. Wasn’t it fascinating how, sometimes, I didn’t even know what I felt until I put it into words? The truth was right there, in my own words, but I hadn’t known it, hadn’t felt it until I’d written it down.
Jesus’s famous words on how the truth will set you free had always been an empty cliché to me, just like the encouragement to move on. But now I felt them on a different level. He’d been right. The truth did set you free…but you had to be ready to see it, to allow it in. And now that I had, the freedom had come.
I did a last reread, then sent it off to Janet. The memoir would follow once I was done rereading it.
I heard the front door open with its familiar squeak. Fraser was back. Even if he hadn’t been the only one with a key, I would’ve known it was him by the rhythm of his steps, the measured tap of his cane, the way the house seemed to shift and expand when he entered it.
“Calloway?”
“In my office,” I called back.
He stepped in moments later, snow dusting his beanie like he’d borrowed a scene from a postcard. His cheeks were pink from the cold, beard wet at the edges where snow had melted into silver. He looked…alive. Exuberant. His eyes found mine and softened.
“Well, you look like a man who’s accomplished something,” he said, bending in to press a cold but welcome kiss on my lips. “What have you done? Reinvented the Dewey Decimal System?”
I grinned. “I finished the p-p-piece for the anthology.”
“Calloway, that’s incredible.”
“I sent it to Janet right b-before you came home.”
Fraser pulled me up from the chair and into a hug that lifted me off my feet. I laughed into his shoulder, warmth blooming in me like spring breaking through the frost.
I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him. No hesitation. No holding back. I kissed him because I was proud, because I was here, because I could.
When I pulled back, he stared at me like he was seeing something entirely new and entirely familiar. “You’re glowing,” he said reverently.
“It’s the lighting.”
“It’s you.” He brushed my face with his fingers. “It’s you coming back to yourself.”
We stood there for a long moment, the cold behind him fading fast, warmth pooling between us.
“I’m so damn proud of you,” he murmured.
