Overcoming

I grieve for the challenges I am put through.
I cry for the pain inflicted on others.
My heart still occasionally wrenches when my thoughts drift about you.
And my eyes unconsciously water.
I only realize it when I feel the dampness on my cheeks.
My mind. My heart. My eyes. None pay any heed to the way I want to feel.
I don't want to feel. I don't want to know. I don't want to comprehend.

It has been months. Even years now.
Yet I still automatically say, "Hey, it's your birthday!" when the day comes.
Then I pause. I pray.

Is a person no longer bound by physical flesh still 'around'?
Or is the spiritual presence something of human fiction? A coping mechanism of sort?
Maybe it is. Maybe it is not.
But I cannot help but think that our memories and lasting impressions we make on the lives of another do make a difference. So did yours. To me.

I remember the non-stop bouts of pain arising from my chest in the first few days.
It pierced like an free blade. Uncaring. Bloody. And it left me immobile. Helpless. Vulnerable.
Time became a cure. However, it was not a cure for an illness.
The pain subdued and I was left alive despite the scars.

When I think about my troubles now, compared to yours. They seem so insignificant.
What it must have been like being raised in a time with limited electricity. Without television. Without streetlights. Without computers. Without mobile devices. Heck. I have it easy.
But I confess that I am guilty of having complained once or twice, okay fine, numerous times, about how I wish I did not live with all these 'distractions'. Yet I know, you would have loved to have experience a life like mine. In a different age. A different time.

I will now live my life looking ahead.
Just as you had always taught me.
Thanks for always being with me; and still being with me to this day.