Death is a weird thing. At first people are quick to comfort you, I guess because immediately afterwards, the bereaved often looks horrible and cries a lot, so only the most inconsiderate, cold-hearted, socially inept folks make no attempt to say anything of comfort. As time goes on, people start to 'worry' about you, as if somehow the passage of one month or two means that you should stop crying and looking terrible. Kind-hearted people suggest medication or therapy and while I appreciated the thought behind it, I will maintain that grief is like a cold. You just have to suffer through it. To medicate it would do nothing to alleviate the great pain I felt, it would only make it easier for others to be around me. So no, I did not medicated. I wept and wept, played a lot of hockey and wept some more.

These days, it's a bit easier. Not because the pain is any less, it's just less immediate. Remembering that Alice is gone is not the first thing I am hit with each morning, it's not the same shock all over again. And now, just when I am ready to talk about her, people dance around the topic of Alice (for you, my loyal three readers, substitue Alice for anything appropriate in your own life and you'll see that I'm guilty of it to, of the akward half-step in conversation when someone refers to their dead relative in the present tense, of the weird silence that comes with any mention of the deceased's name, of all that shit. I think it's inevitable.).

I don't know that this can be changed, I think it's just human nature but it sucks. Death sucks. So for all of my friends who have lost people, know that I'm here to listen to your stories and will talk about them in any tense that you'd like.