Katie, Eric, and each are keeping a daily journal this year. It’s a prefab journal, with a short prompt every day. You can jump in wherever you are, because the 365 prompts are numbered but not dated. Start on August 2, 2016? You will end a year later. We began ours in June. I am sure there are other journals that do the same thing, but here’s ours on Amazon. It just happened to be what I found.

Yesterday I answered the prompt, “Write three things you would do with a favorite person.” Actually, it said, “Write three things you would do with your favorite person,” but I can’t live life that way—picking favorites, that is, when I think everyone has something beautiful inside to offer the world. As if I have only one favorite, when in fact I have so many favorite people… So I had to cross it out and do a little editing even to begin.

Anyway, here is what I wrote:

“1. Catch up on all of our news this past year, you in your most comfortable yellow chair and I on your couch;

2. Eat tuna fish sandwiches with sweet pickles while the mailman drops off your mail and tennis is on the TV;

3. Wave goodbye to you as we pull out from your driveway, watching you in your garage doorway blowing kisses until we are out of sight.”

We’re a few weeks off from a year this August since you’ve been gone, Nana. I keep wondering when the sadness won’t feel so fresh anymore, the rapids always at the surface of my eyeballs and thick at my throat if I think about how much I miss you for too long.

Too long—or just the space of time in which it takes to write three sentences in a kids’ journal of daily prompts. Eternity, disguised as minutes.

I always suspected, but now know, that I will miss you keenly for the rest of my life.