When December Started to Feel Heavy

There’s a particular quiet that comes with December,
a quiet that isn’t peaceful, but reflective.
A quiet that asks you to sit with everything you’ve lived through,
and everything you’ve lost.

This year, that quiet feels heavier than ever.

As the days inch closer to Christmas, I find myself drifting back to Vic without even trying. He appears in memories, in smells, in songs, in the stillness before sunrise… and sometimes in the small, unexpected moments that catch me off guard.

I keep replaying those final months, the sharp words said out of frustration, the misunderstandings, the regrets that only became clear once time ran out. I tell myself I didn’t know. I couldn’t have known. But grief has a way of pressing “rewind” on the moments you wish you could undo.

And the strangest part is this:
I miss even the arguments.

Those fiery text exchanges that once felt exhausting… now feel strangely sacred. They meant we were still connected, still engaging, still part of each other’s orbit. Now there is only silence and I never realised how loud silence could be until it became all that was left.

No one else truly understands the shape of my grief.
Not his parents.
Not his siblings.

Blood alone doesn’t give someone more right to grief than another. And love doesn’t evaporate just because a relationship shifted or ended. Twenty years is not erased by a label like “ex-wife,” no matter how many times it’s used to dismiss or belittle what I feel.

So yes, I’ve kept my distance from those who spoke unkindly or treated my grief like it was optional. Protecting my peace isn’t selfish. It’s survival. I needed space to hurt openly without being judged, questioned, or placed lower in some imagined hierarchy of loss.

Because the truth is this:

I am grieving in my own way —
quietly, honestly, painfully.

I’m holding memories gently, even when they burn my hands.
I’m learning how to live with the echoes of what was,
and what will never be again.

And maybe this, this quiet, tender aching,
is what love looks like now.

Not in shared mourning.
Not in loud declarations of loss.
But in the slow, private carrying of a story only I know from the inside.

The missing itself is proof he mattered.
And maybe that’s enough for this December.