Trail's End

For more than a while now I have been struggling to put into words the keen sense of loss I still feel over Ingrid's death. Just now I was reading the comments on a story about whether it's selfish to have a second child so your first child will have a pal, and I came across this phrase: "someone to walk through the world sharing a common history with."

Now aside from how weird it is that I was reading anything about having children, that is a version of what Ingrid meant to me. Because we knew each other so young, and for so long, it felt as though we had an almost-common history and that we'd been walking through the world, indelibly connected, for a long time. I took it for granted that we'd be old ladies together. We talked about it, joked about it, described it to each other.

And now my old-lady walking pal is gone. And nobody else gets to walk through the world with her either. I think it sucks for all of us.

That about sums it up.