525,600 Minutes

This song made me cry the first time I heard it sometime around 1997. Back then I didn't cry as easily as I do now. When I finally saw it performed live, I cried again. If you don't know the song, it's from the musical Rent. It's the exact number of minutes in a year. The song asks- "How do you measure, measure a year?

In daylights?

In sunsets?

In midnights?

In cups of coffee?

In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife?

525,600 minutes came last week. A whole year since Kevin died. All of the things above happened and then some. I spent the day thinking about Kevin, trying to measure it all, remember it all... that last day, the last months of his life, the minutes since then. A year passing felt surreal. How could it be a whole year when there were moments that felt like I could turn around and he'd be there? How could it be a year when there was still his side of the bed? How could it be a year when his deodorant is still in the medicine cabinet? (Don't judge me, grief is weird)  

There's no door to grief that you get to close once you reach a year. You survive the days (and I mean that word in a way I never understood before). You survive all of these firsts... a first birthday, a first Christmas, a first wedding anniversary. You wake up day after day and then somehow you just made it through all of the minutes. It goes both too fast and too slow. But the door on grief doesn't close. You walk through it every day, every minute of every day. You feel your loss in every moment. Sometimes you recognize that you're feeling it, sometimes you don't. Sometimes it's a joyful memory, sometimes it's a tear that rolls down your face while you're doing laundry. Then just like that it's 525,600 minutes without your person. You wonder if you were even awake. Wonder if you even took a single breath during the whole year. Is it illogical to think that you held your breath for all those minutes? 

I didn't listen to the song on Tuesday, because I'm not a masochist and the day was already hard. But it was there in the back of my brain as I tried to take a breath and start another year.