Long after my youngest brother died, I used to imagine that he was living somewhere else. He’d left his old life behind and started over. He left the stress of his work: the hiring, the firing and the grinding hours seven days a week … the whole thing. It was the stress that hastened his death at his desk at age forty.

A few months after he died, I saw a man in the supermarket who looked like him. He walked the way my brother did. I followed him around and watched him walk.

I told this to a friend recently, and she said; "So had you lost your mind?"

She’s never known grief, or engulfing sorrow. The kind of loss that passes all understanding of the known world.

She’s never known what the mind is capable of conjuring up just to mete out the sorrow, slowly, so you can get used to the idea of never seeing the one person you want to see most. How you struggle to understand that the thing you long for, that ride down a country road with that person for just another second, what your heart desires, you will never have again.

She’s never known the sadness of realizing that the person – with his unabashed humor, his uninhibited laugh, his love of small things – will never come again.

No, that friend knows nothing of this. And I cannot tell her about it.

“No, I had not lost my mind,” I said. “I was just learning how to live without him.”

I am still learning how to live without him a decade later.

But it’s getting better.

And like the bulbs I am planting right now, love slumbers on.