Between Grief & Grace, a love poem for my sister, Beata

Loss rearranges us.
It has a way of bringing us to our knees--
and maybe even, to our truth.
It strips away the noise, the distractions,
our illusions of control.
It interrupts life as we thought we always knew it--
and in its place, a mirror…
unforgiving. Unblinking.
A raw face of what was not fully understood before:
The way a body absorbs sorrow.
The toll of unresolved strain.
The quiet suffering that goes unseen for far too long.
How our emotional lives anchor in our blood pressure,
our arteries, our migraines,
our fatigue, our oppression...
Our bodies speak when our hearts cannot.
In spaces where pain is silently carried.
Where love, unattended, slowly starves the spirit
and shapes the course of life.
We learn how love lingers
in the cracked spaces.
How memory becomes marrow--
invisible, yet life-giving.
We learn the language of absence.
Of unfinished conversations.
Of laughter that still hums in the bones
long after the voice is gone.
We carry both the ache and the light.
We hold what couldn’t be healed,
alongside what was given freely:
a glance, a touch, a moment of knowing.
Such is the quiet dignity of sorrow.
And somehow,
we go on
and are more human for it.



​Lydia