#4 Summer of Grief — A Doorway Back
It was a warm summer day. My partner and I began the day as we often do: slowly, with love, coffee, and the soft presence of friends gathered by the water in Amsterdam. But even in the glow of such days, grief finds its own way in. It doesn’t knock, doesn’t wait. It arrived gently, almost invisibly, when my partner received the news: the dog who had been not just his mother’s, but his own closest companion for years, was going to be put to sleep.
And just like that, the day tilted. A shadow passed through the sunlight. Grief had entered, quiet but certain — reminding us how loss doesn’t need grand entrances. It appears mid-laughter, mid-sip, mid-summer. Even when you feel held by life, it can still come. And you ask yourself, how do I carry both; this light and this ache?
But even within sorrow, there’s presence. The kind that assures you: what once was loved hasn’t truly left. Not entirely. It lives in other forms — not the physical kind, but in something weightless, cosmic, suspended beyond the eye’s reach. Everything that once breathed beside us now drifts just past the edge of sight — and still, somehow, stays.
Later that day, I made blackcurrant jam for the first time.
It’s something I’d long told myself I couldn’t do — not like my grandmother did. Ever since she passed, the thought felt too tender, too untouchable. Every summer, my sisters and I spent weeks with her in Latvia. She’d send us into the woods with buckets, barefoot and curious, to gather berries. Later, she would stir great pots of jam in her kitchen — rich, fragrant, glowing — and we were allowed only one spoonful a day. Because it was precious. Because too much might hurt our stomachs. Because she believed beauty was best tasted slowly.
Today, I stirred that pot myself. And to my quiet disbelief, I came close — close enough to her memory that it stirred something in me. I said I’d only taste one spoon. But I had more. And though my stomach turned a little wild, I didn’t care. What I tasted wasn’t just fruit and sugar — it was the past. It was her voice. The hum of summer heat outside her kitchen window. Dozens of jars lined up for winters and holidays; her way of bottling time. Of giving us, later, a doorway back.
Today, grief folded itself into sweetness. It clung to the scent of jam and drifted beside the sun. It was present in the tenderness of friends, the weight of loss, the joy of something once lost being found again — if only in taste, in memory, in the space between absence and presence.
