She shined bright like a transcendent gift shining her joy onto the dulled grey skies of our lives. She cared and she loved more than she'd ever ask for, just because it was in her nature, her presence, her gift. And she never asked for anything in return, apart from the pure adoration all her family gave her, as the one who accepted the world for what it was, and turned its flaws into its beauty.
But like anything precious, she disappeared before I had a chance to return the love and support she had been giving us for years.
She was gone in a whisper of the night, nothing more than a text message of explanation to leave my mind screaming.
And that night, we mourned the loss of our gift, and felt the shadows casting over us, the dulled grey skies crawling back, shivering in the cold night.
And I wondered how I couldn't have seen this pain coming. I had a year to realise it, but a hope remained in my thoughts, like it was another thing to break my spirit, like it wasn't our gift vanishing through our hands.
But I didn't know it was pain until I saw my grandfather's eyes swell with the same mourning and grief, how I hugged my grandmother in support because she couldn't sleep the night before, her heart too lost, how she squeezed me tight and told me that I had told our gift that we treasured her just before the darkness came.
And yes, I've heard of the stories of the lost gifts leaving their loved ones through this disease. A word that over my life, I had witnessed change from an abnormality to a mundane side effect of survival.
But never, for one second, did I think it would take my gift. It wasn't strong enough to. It didn't have the same level of power. And even when I heard the mutters of the chances, the mumbles of her life expectancy, I smothered it and forgot it was reality. I believed that this wouldn't be a period of mourning, but instead a period of bravery and survival. Because I couldn't see a world where we wouldn't have her. It didn't seem like a reality. It didn't seem like a possibility.
But the truth was written in her stone.
And one day our hearts will wrap themselves around reality. Smile because the gift was with us for a little while instead of cry with the agony of losing it.
I speak as a niece, my heart fractured. But the true suffering is buried within the shredded hearts of her husband, children, sister, brother, mother, father. They're the ones who need to understand the absence of the gift and one day, turn their dulled grey into a lighter blue as our gift would have taught them to do.
I love you Ruthy.
