There's something almost unsettling about how quickly life folds itself back into place after someone leaves it.
My neighbor's wife died last year. I remember how the compound felt in those first weeks, hushed, careful, everyone lowering their voices when they greeted him. Sympathy visits, food brought over, the kind of silence that fills a space when a family is grieving.
He has moved on now. Genuinely moved on laughing at the gate, catching up with the other men in the evening, going about life like a man untouched. And I'll admit, the first time I saw him laughing again, something in me flinched. It felt too soon. It felt almost disloyal to her memory.
But the more I sat with it, the more I questioned my own reaction. What was I expecting that he perform grief indefinitely for my comfort? That moving on was proof he hadn't loved her enough? I don't actually know what his nights look like, what he still carries when no one's watching. I only see the version of him that walks past my gate.
I think maybe I've confused visible grief with real grief before assumed that if someone looks fine, they must not have cared enough. But maybe healing isn't supposed to look like suffering. Maybe he loved her fully and is now doing the harder, quieter thing: living without her, out loud, instead of performing loss for the neighborhood's benefit.
I still don't know if I've fully let go of my first judgment of him. Some part of me still watches him laugh and feels a small, uninvited pang on her behalf. Maybe that says more about my own fears of being forgotten, of how easily any of us could be moved past than it says about him at all.
