A Year
Because grief is love with nowhere to go
Today, a poem wrote me.
Because that’s how poetry comes. Unannounced. Uncontained. Spilling through when something inside needs to speak. Today marks one year since my brother-in-law, Lance, passed away. A whole year. It feels impossible to hold that truth. What is time in this alternate universe of grief, where moments stretch and collapse, where love remains but the body is gone?
This poem is for Lance.
This poem is for my sister, and for my niece.
This poem is for anyone living inside the quiet ache of loving someone who is greatly missed.
If you would like to listen to me read this poem aloud, you can click play below.
A Year
February 3, 2026
A year.
A year.
365 days of wishing you were here.
Watching my sister unravel and restitch herself on a daily basis,
searching for stasis
that won’t come yet in the turbulence.
The wake of your loss. The imbalance.
Like losing a limb
and learning to walk again.
It takes time.
Time that feels impossibly against logic,
because it somehow crawls agonizingly slow
and fast all at once.
Aching and nostalgic.
Always landing with a ragged breath in eternity,
stretching endlessly,
punctuated by the yearning beats of our hearts.
Rhythmic, synchronized stops and starts,
mirroring the stitches we’re sewing each day
to weave a new normal with this beautiful pain.
Why beautiful?
Because etched into the fabric of the rift
is the depth of a love known… a gift,
without which we wouldn’t be feeling this.
Astride of the wish that the outcome was different,
we are deeply grateful for your life
and the time you were in it.
You left a mark with your radiant spirit.
Your song still sings,
and we all still hear it.
If you are living with grief, fresh or familiar, may this poem meet you gently. There is no right timeline, no clean edge where loss ends and life resumes. There is only the slow, tender weaving of love and absence, learning how to walk again with what remains.
Perhaps this is an invitation to notice where grief lives in your body today, and to honor it. Not as something to fix, but as evidence of a love that mattered deeply. May you feel less alone in it. May you feel the quiet truth that love does not disappear, even when someone does.
And may we keep listening for the songs that still sing.
With love,
Cara
If these words touched something tender in you, trust that it’s the soul calling you home. May we keep turning toward that still place within us, where healing and love are always waiting.
I write as a poet and a spiritual healer walking beside you on this winding path of becoming. My words are offerings – seeds of remembrance, presence, and love – planted in service of our collective healing. May they help you come home to yourself, to each other, and to the quiet wisdom of the earth.