Grief fills my psyche from which flow these images:

Grief cracks hearts, buckles knees, evokes sighs, and distorts reality: its blackness, the mixture of primary colors.  

Like fine granules of soot, grief seeps into inaccessible realms of spirit, discolors memory’s story, taints judgment, and hazards activities of daily living.

Like a medieval hairshirt, grief irritates nerves, prickles to the point of pain, constricts breathing, and welts backs with hairline sores.

Like hobnail boots, grief tramps up and down the peaks and valleys of quicksand moments, trudges through sand-blistered winds of change, lapses into forgetfulness, and imprints the terrain with its history, its courage only grasped later.

We have just lost a kind neighbor on our court, so willing to endure years of treatments for his disease, in the midst of his loving family.

His name was Tony. We will miss him, very much.