I really loved you Grant. I did. It’s not that I don’t have love for you. I do. I just realized that the love I once had for you is changed, but it was real when it was what it once was. It was deep, as deep as one can love another.

It filled the depths of my soul as I let myself love you as much as I knew how. There was never going to be another man for me as long as you were there. Even with all your imperfections, I loved those things about you. I always did and I wanted to forever.

When you left me in this life, it was as if a part of my soul was ripped from my being. From the depths of me, it felt like the love for you would never end, and never be again. That part of me is gone, taken in that moment because where it existed ceased to be anymore.

Everything changed in me the day you died. I didn’t want it to, so I kept wanting what I could never have again; that was you and me and what we were. I didn’t want to stop wanting it, and that kept me wanting a nonexistent possibility. I’ve clung to it for all these years.

One day, just a few days ago, I felt the love I had for you. I felt it in the past tense. I loved you. I truly loved you. What a gift that was for you and for me; to love someone as deeply, fully, and as real as I loved you.

That experience of love with you was one of the most beautiful experiences of my existence. And, in that moment, I felt how much I did once love you. There is a lot of truth in the saying that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

The love that was there, exists still. It’s just in the past where it belongs. I recognized it in the space of where it existed and that’s where it belongs now. The feeling of that love I had for you being in the past felt like a new freedom for me.

It felt as if I was finally, for a moment, really present to now. The present that you’re not in and the present that is the reality of us; the reality of my life now. You’re gone. As much as I loved you when I did in our past life time together, I need that love to live in the past where you reside in my life.

Grant you are a beautiful, wonderful part of my past and in my past. Feeling the absence of the feelings of love that I had and gave to you; it felt as if something inside of me opened up to be free from holding on to a love that can no longer be.

So, while I’m no longer in love with you the same way, I love so many things about you. I love the life we had. I love the children we made. I love the memories I cherish. I love the memories of the many things that made you smile.

You showed me the life that was in you and why I loved you. I love the things we built together that still exist now. Even though everything we built in that life looks different now in this life I am presently in. Even though everything we built no longer has you as part of it.

All those things we built, all the things we did, the people we were; I love all of them. I love even more what they’ve all grown into today, without you. It is the realization of this life I have without you, it’s a full life I have, and it’s fully without you.

I’m grateful to recognize that because it’s not that I want to live without you, but that I am living without you. I’m grateful to know and be aware of this. That’s the reality and that reality doesn’t have the space to love you the way I did. It doesn’t make sense to.

The space I have now doesn’t have room for the love I had for you, not without you in it. So it is with the grace of a goodbye, the goodbye I never got to say that I now use to speak to you. It would not have been a good goodbye anyway at that time because I didn’t want goodbye.

I loved the life we had. I recognize the love I had with you then. In this moment I feel open and free to live this reality, love in my life and create a new beautiful reality and be more at peace with my past.

With Christmas and Holiday parties galore, I miss you. I’m moving forward in life.

Love,