It will get easier

Was there ever a bigger lie told, than ‘it will get easier’? Was there ever a more useless platitude, a more toothless attempt to soothe?
It doesn’t get easier. The years don’t dull the pain, or replace the choking sobs with a wistful sigh. They don’t loosen the chains around your chest that crush your lungs till you can hardly breathe. They change nothing. The years serve only as a reminder of how long you have been grieving.
As time goes by you conform to convention, hiding your pain behind a smile that doesn’t reach your eyes. And they look, and they smile back, satisfied that you’re getting better, nodding to themselves that they were right all along: it did get easier.
But the grief lies inside you like you’ve swallowed a stone, and you drag it back home where they won’t see you stumble. And you daren’t let yourself think about what you have lost, because then you’ll be lost too, and you can’t bear the pain. You can’t bear the pressure that builds in your head; the tsunami of mourning that crashes over you, dragging you back to the the day you said goodbye. And you feel him in your arms, and you smell his head, and you hear the tiny sound of his last breath. And you wish with all your heart you had fought for him to stay.
But you didn’t. And he left. And now this is your penance. The grief that defines you; that keeps you at arm’s length from the people who want to help; that stops you from living the way you know life should be lived.
The grief that doesn’t get easier.
The grief that never will.