From Great Love, Comes Great Loss... Comes Great Love.

Two weeks before I got the call to come back to home, I was on the phone, this time with him. He asked me about my temporary job that I had just gotten, as an assistant to the Dean at the Harvard School of Public health.

It was my first real job out of college and I was barely twenty-two. That summer after I graduated, I fought to get back to Boston. I fought him. I left that August, secured a dingy basement apartment in September and by October had my first job. If I had known better, I would have known that something in him was trying to keep me closer to home. But I was young and stubborn and hellbent on getting back to the life I had built for myself up north.

He was in the hospital and had just finished dialysis. His voice was breathy and broken across the phone line. "Keep your desk clean," he said, giving me advice when the only thing I wanted to hear was him asking me to come home. "It will show them that you have respect for yourself and your job."

For many months after his passing, I remembered less of the man he was, and more of the mourning that followed. The image of the dirt falling out of the shovel and onto his casket. Sitting with my cousins in the gazebo in the backyard, trying to find some sort of normalcy, in a world where our foundation had been swept from underneath us. Family coupled in the tables on the back patio. My grandmother. Bowls of olives. The images changed but the feeling, though, always consistent. I had lost my best friend. I lost my ally. More than anything, at its very truth, I lost the person that saved the seat next to him for me. I lost the feeling of comfort , and the security in knowing he would always be there.

It will be nine years now since he has been gone, and the more time passes, the more I remember the smallest moments. It's not every day and they come and go, it's true. But after a long day's work, when I prepare my things to start the long trek home, I clear my desk and turn off the light, and I hear him. . . every time.


Life is divided into these small moments -- both happy and sad. We keep them with us, hold them close. They are our strength to push us through and also our weakness and baggage.

One night this past week, the intimidating boss and I were packing in a late night and leaving work. She was talking about her new boyfriend, how he'd sort of mentioned the idea of a marriage proposal. This woman that was so normally rigid, became light-hearted, carefree -- a school girl floating on the air of her first kiss. Seeing her like that, just confirmed what I have always known -- I will feel that again someday.

Ever since then, even though I had felt it before, it's on the surface more -- the affirmation that I am a wonderful woman with so much to offer and so much love to give. And maybe I not-so-long-ago suffered one of love's most awful punishments. . . but I am no longer willing to punish myself.

If anything, I may even love smaller moments more now... freely, purely, whole-heartedly... and perhaps, with a school-girl hope, that fate's hand has saved a blessing for me.