Verses From the In-Between

For those learning to hold on and let go at once.

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

When love meets change, we grieve in slow motion. These are words from that space - between presence and absence, ache and grace.

Grief doesn’t always come packaged with a funeral and flowers. Sometimes, it edges in quietly when the person we love is still here, but no longer reachable in the same way.

It creates an in-between space, stretched out over time, carrying both the ache of slow loss and the grace of staying present.

Ebbs and

Flows: grief comes and

Goes. See, you’re here, yet gone.

Fragile, yet funny; frail, yet strong:

Your smile.

I wrote this 5-line poem about 18 months ago, during a time of waves - ebbing and flowing through what I’ve come to understand as living grief.

Living grief is when we mourn a loved one who is still with us but whose identity, skills and relationships are changing through diseases like dementia or Alzheimer’s.

Writing grief poetry helped me touch that quiet ache and give language to what felt impossible to name. I wrote about my dad’s diagnoses - both dementia (at the front of his brain) and Alzheimer’s (at the back).

I love this poem because it captures the ache yet holds the grace of him still being present with his smile. It helped me see that there was an in-between - for him, for my mum, for our family, and within my own grief.

We found it hard to talk about at first, even to acknowledge how difficult it was in those early, uncertain days before his diagnoses in 2018. Writing these verses became a way to connect with my confusion, to name “grief,” and to stay tender as I watched my parents’ worlds shift acutely and overwhelmingly.

That tenderness became the heart of my book, The Edge of Grief - written from the in-between spaces of love, loss and what remains.

You can find it through the link below, if you’d like to read more.

The Edge of Grief

Until next time, Bev x