Today is the first day of spring and it sure feels like it. Heavy rains pour down from the sky. Today feels like a day to be indoors and to reflect. We’re approaching six months from Kody’s death, but today is more significant to me. Kody chose the fall equinox as his day to die starting my journey with suicide loss. The fall equinox is a time of endings. A time where the world dies back and reaches a point of stagnancy. The leaves fall from the trees, plants die back, some disappear entirely.

So as today is the spring equinox, I walk around the yard of my new home and see signs of resurrection everywhere. I have never experienced this yard in the spring as I moved in shortly after Kody’s death. I can see numerous blossoms starting to come up from soil I thought was empty. Pots that were filled with empty dirt are now filled with emerging buds. On the trees, countless buds have begun to unfold in the beginning of leaves.

Everything in the yard is turning to green. The brown branches have buds on them and green is popping from all the places where brown and dark colors prevailed. All the while the rain continues to pour and drip from the branches all around me. It is not the freezing rain of winter, but the renewing rain of spring. When I stand out in the yard, looking at all the life bursting forth around me, I can feel a renewal inside of my own heart as well.

Over the last two seasons, I have felt as if I was like the rest of the world, stagnant, waiting. The world has felt dark, and cold. Now with the days growing longer, the rain pouring down from the sky, and life bursting forth in every corner of my yard, I feel out of pace with the season. Shouldn’t I too be resurrecting?

The truth is that suicide loss is so challenging to move forward from. Even knowing that Kody is not suffering anymore, doesn’t allow me to be fully at peace. The physical loss of his being is so challenging. The wish that there was something that could have been done is almost overpowering.

I let the rain wash over me, the way he and I did on so many occasions. Out in the rain, I feel him closer than before. A jolt of joy, separate from my own feelings flashes through me. A joy that I know is his. Any time I reach for him deep within myself, I am flooded with joy, happiness, and peace. All things I only glimpsed in him in life. I know he lives on in me and in everyone he touched during his life. That knowledge is what makes grief bearable.