*Some people come into your life and you just know you will never be able to replace them if they left.*

This was one of the first things I read today on my Facebook page. It’s more fitting than you know because I am grieving. One of my friends of more than 20 years passed away a little over 2 weeks ago. His memorial was this last Saturday.

It wasn’t a sudden thing; we’ve been expecting it for 8 years or so. He had 2 bouts of cancer, the second one far more terrible than the first.

But expecting the death wasn’t so bad, it gave us all time to get used to the idea of him leaving us one day. The second bout even had us quite scared for about six months as we were told that the tumor would eventually eat through the vascular areas between his liver and gallbladder and he would bleed out and die almost instantaneously. Now that was a scary thought; he would be alive one second, dead the next. He stopped driving because of the risk. He stopped going to a lot of places because he didn’t want to die like that away from home.

I think what’s getting me is that it really, finally happened. He is gone. I saw the box of his ashes at the memorial.

I hurt. My creative brain is dry. I feel the loss. I know he’s okay though, I have gotten an angel message from him letting me know. My grief is about me. It’s me letting go of the human I knew and loved. Not an easy task, letting go, but a necessary one. This one will take time though. And I will take all the time I need.

But, as the above statement says, he will never be replaced.