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Grief can bring the lost person closer.

Moments of forgetting lost loved ones can trigger guilt but are a normal part of healing.

Allowing grief to soften can expand the ways the loved one remains part of your ongoing life.

Marcus was at his nephew’s birthday party when it happened. Someone told a dumb joke—and he laughed. Really laughed. Head back, his face momentarily radiant, the kind of laugh he had not managed in months.

For perhaps four seconds, he was simply a man at a party.

Then he turned, on reflex, to share the moment with Vanessa.

For 15 years, this had been his instinct. She loved foolish jokes and would often cover her mouth and close her eyes, as though trying to capture the fleeting joy before it escaped.

The four seconds collapsed.

Vanessa was not there. He excused himself and stood in the hallway beside the coat closet, gripping at a jacket sleeve as though it were a life jacket.

He had been laughing, unguarded and happy, and for that brief stretch of time, she had not existed to him at all. He had forgotten her—not the fact of her death, but the brutal reality of her absence: that she was not laughing with their friends in another room, not helping prepare the food as she had always loved to do, not living some parallel moment just beyond his sight. She was simply and absolutely gone.

“How could I have forgotten?” he thought, and the forgetting itself felt like a crime.

Worse, it seemed dangerous. If he could forget Vanessa for four seconds, perhaps the tenuous sense that she remained close to him would eventually disappear altogether.

By the time he returned, the party had moved on, and presents were being opened. Marcus sat down; he smiled politely and inwardly withdrew. Some part of him had decided, without consulting the rest of him, that he would not be caught like that again.

But a vow like that is hard to keep, especially when it so often narrows your lost love down to a single grey note—grief, and........

© Psychology Today