This journey into grief has proven to be filled with discoveries,
Not just about the beauty of you, my beautiful brother,
And not only the amount of love and affection that I hold for you,
but it also serves as a window or rather a cheat-sheet for the personalities of those that I’m surrounded with…

Ever since you’re gone, my affectionate brother, finding kindness has been harder than usual…
You dispensed it and did so without measure or reserve, and it was up to me to decide how much I can take…
Unfortunately, I wasn’t wise enough to be as greedy with you as I should have…
I didn’t realise that your offer, like anything in the world, is limited by a time factor that no one knows…

But someone who I live with suggested inadvertently that one should put deadlines to grief…
That same someone has been largely avoiding me ever since you left and ever since I started to react to your departure, but that’s not the main point here…
A deadline? To grieve you?
A deadline? For what exactly?
And what happens after the deadline?
Do your story suddenly become irrelevant?
Do I pretend that you don’t exist?
Should I suddenly start thinking of all the nasty things you might have engaged in in your life or try to look into our relationship from an angle of distrust and disdain, you know, so that I would facilitate this transition into a grief-free life?

My affectionate brother,
My heart is appalled by such a suggestion, and I pity the person and what life brought to them to the point that they’d prefer to live a robotic life where feelings and memories don’t have meaning any more, and where the sheer value of human existence is only regarded from a sense of how one is of benefit to society at large through work productivity or providing social entertainment to those around…

My heart tells me that I will grieve you as much as I can and as fiercely as it can get…
That there’s sweetness even in those cloistered moments of anguish…
That I completely disregard that thought of returning to pre-crisis productivity because there will be no post-crisis…
The crisis happened and will stay and my heart – and those around me – need to find a way to accommodate that…

So, no, brother…
I plan to continue staying in my room, lighting your candle, holding your picture close to me, and telling you I love you five hundred times an hour…
I will still cuddle with your photo-frame at night, irrespective of how weird that may sound to anyone, including you…
I will let my mind meander into every little interaction that we had together…
And I will scour the internet and the brains of those closest to you for memories and cues into your existence…
And if you think that’s too much, you might as well come down and tell me so…

My master plan of grief is this…
To remember you and cherish you and hold you close to my heart until one day we’re reunited…
So maybe yes, there should be a deadline for grief…
And let that unknown day of reunion be my deadline.