Do you know how grief is measured?

Do you know how grief is measured? Is it by the flood of tears washing over your face? Or by the inability to cry at all? Perhaps it’s a wordless sob, a soul torn into shreds, or a heart shattered into a million tiny pieces. Maybe it’s the dark thoughts that bleed like open wounds. Or the longing that can no longer be measured by any known scale. Or perhaps it’s love—suddenly severed, snapping like a violin string.

How do we measure that killing sorrow—the one that tears from within a vast piece of yourself, the part where you kept love, attachment, care, joy, tender moments, laughter, even anger—every dawn and every sunset you believed would never end in separation?

Something inside me laughs—a cruel, almost demonic laugh—mocking my naivety, my faith, my helplessness. That something laughs, while I drown in myself like in a salty sea, searching for memories that could help me rise, resurface, stand again. I search through my mind for moments that were bright, beautiful, full of promise, never disappointing, unforgettable. How fortunate that we’ve been given memory—the ability to recall what has already been torn from our present and now drifts, dusted by time, into the valley of our past.

So how do we measure our grief? We measure it by everything—and that everything is a madness of pain, a dagger relentlessly stabbing the soul and the heart… again… and again… and again. I wait, hoping that time will heal the wounds left by the blade—but I know it won’t. Never. There will only remain a scar, beneath which hides all that was once so achingly beautiful.