In the initial shock, I went into remote control just doing the next thing. Holding my child. Making the call to my brother. Calling the hospice nurse. Holding my child. Calling his grandparents. Calling the funeral director. Holding my child.
No matter how much preparation, no one is truly prepared. After the arrangements had been made, and all had been done, I was left undone.
Matt’s body laid in the bedroom. An informal wake spontaneously surfaced. People who loved him came by to be with what was left of him.
When his grandfather came by, I went for a walk in the November air to the place Lydia and I had a deep conversation before her death. It was there she gave me her only request. She said, “Don’t let him suffer.”
I was overwhelmed with emptiness. There was no respite on that pier. I couldn’t even respond to Lydia with what I wanted to say. I wanted to say, “I did the best I could.”
In overwhelming loss, words have no anchor. They settle on wind and empty into sky. More than words escaped me on that pier, on the day of his death. It was the end of a very long journey that was way too short. But nothing ever ends.
I returned to others who had gathered in the room with Matt’s body. But there was a part of me that never returned from that moment on the pier.
Loss innately lives looking for closure. But closure is not an event. It is not the signing of a peace treaty between two countries and the war is over. Closure is the ongoing settlement of peace that is embedded in every moment. Closure happens throughout loss, within loss, into what is forever lost and what is never lost.
Closure is not an ending, but a beginning.
So, what really matters?
In my journey, what matters is to open to what needs to settle within me, to let go of what needs to go and receive what I am offered in this moment. To 
live peacefully in the inhalation and exhalation of each breath loss leaves me and life gives me.
Closure is not about ending my love for them. Closure is about opening to a deeper love, a love not bound by beginnings or endings.
I sat on that pier at the beginning of closure, not the end. I am forever beginning and ending, layer into layer. When my pain rises from either a memory or the missing part of this moment, I release into what holds me there and then release into what lies beyond what I hold.
What matters most to me is how to live in relationship with all of life. Their deaths did not take their lives. It only took their bodies. I still live in love with the ones I love. I had to come to a place where this love could continue to flourish, to open and close and open again and again. I needed to find a new way of relating to life, to love, to them, to me.
Closure is embracing all I have been given and release it into all that gives. And in turn, I am given more. I am given a chance to embrace with really matters, what is truly important to me – to release into the love of the ones I love in a more expansive love.
One of my favorite movies is Harold and Maude. There is a scene where they are sitting on a pier and Harold gives Maude very expensive ring. She is overwhelmed with gratitude and Harold is extremely pleased. She thanks him profusely for the ring and then throws it into the water. Harold is shocked and confused. Maude gently explains that now she will always know where it is and that now it could never be lost.
I have lost much in my life, but I have not lost love. I know where my love lives. And I know that that is all that really matters.
In letting go, in the ever unfolding of release, there is the ever unfolding of embrace into something deeper, something more expansive. This is the true meaning of closure.
Closure is not the end of my love. Closure is the beginning of a deeper love. It is the beginning of what never ends. It is the opening to the ever-expanding love I have for the ones I will always love.
When I let go of everything into everything, I find everything that really matters. I find the unending expanse of love that has no end and needs no beginning.
