A silence unlike any other follows heartbreak.

It’s not a peaceful silence, but the stillness of something sacred having been forever shattered.

You can almost hear the faint echo of what once lived there—the love, laughter, the words, the touch–the familiar rhythm of two lives brushing against each other.

Now, it’s all memory and ache.

When the heart breaks, time slows. The mind loops endlessly around what happened and why….why….why….trying to rewrite the story, to undo what cannot be undone.

“I want her back.”

But heartbreak is not something to fix—it is something to walk through. to survive. It asks us to sit inside the ache and let it carve us open. Every instinct says to resist, but heartbreak actually invites surrender.

What else can we do?

If we listen closely,beneath the noise of grief, there’s a pulse—faint, yes, but steady. It reminds us that life continues to flow, even through the cracks. The breaking is not the end of love but a transformation of it.

I’d like to believe that, anyway.

Heartbreak teaches humility. It reminds us that love is not possession, and that nothing living can be held forever. It can humble the ego and expand the soul, if we allow it to.

I’m trying. I’ve had so much loss in recent years. Through the pain, though, I’ve learned a few things.

The tenderness that comes after—the rawness, the trembling empathy—is the ground of compassion.

From this place, we begin to see that all hearts break, in their own ways, and that this is part of the human condition.

So we breathe. We learn to live with the emptiness. We water it with tears and moments of small grace—a friend’s voice, a sunrise, the ocean. Slowly, new shoots of life push through the soil of loss. The heart, impossibly, begins to mend—not by erasing the pain, but by folding it into a deeper wholeness.

That can take a while.

A broken heart is not a failure. It is evidence of having dared to love, to risk, to open. And though the world tells us to move on, the deeper invitation is to move through. To allow the wound to teach us tenderness.

To let it make us more alive, not less.

Because, in the end, a heart that has never been broken has never truly been open.

For my beautiful little Cutie, who crossed the Rainbow Bridge on Oct. 13, 2025.  My heart hurts with missing your joyful presence. Until we meet again at the Rainbow Bridge.