irreconcilable

In the interest of doing something worthwhile, I have recently been forced to ask myself a question that could have very comfortably gone unanswered. How do you come to terms with an irreconcilable loss?

About a year ago, I heard about a place called Judi's House. They help kids work through the grief of a lost loved one. From the minute I heard about it, I couldnt think of something I would rather invest myself in. You see, a year and a half ago, I lost someone I loved very much. His name was Quinton, and he was... beautiful. It was Quinton that brought me to Judi's House. But what I didnt expect is how much of him I would find there.

We spent a weekend training to help kids through their process of grief. To my own surprise, I found that my process of grief has remained painfully stunted. They say the the first task of grief is accepting that the death is real and understanding that it is final. They want us to use the terms bluntly and with authority... dead, death, died. And I had to ask myself, am I there? Do I understand these things? The answer to that questions holds more than I have the strength to sort through. Because I realized, there is a part of me that believes that Quinton is coming back. Dont get me wrong, I know that he is gone. But the finality of that seems impossible to me. When I allow myself to consider fully the gravity of him being gone, it is almost incapacitating. And to think that that will never change... that it will never get better. I dont know how to let that be true. Everything has an end, right? But the end of losing someone is finding them again. So, somewhere deeper than I have been able to reach until now, I have been waiting to find Quinton again. How do I reconcile that part of me with every other part of me that knows that he is gone and feels the weight of it every day? I dont know that I can. Is that ok?