It's nearly impossible to do unless you're one of the lucky chosen few to have an uneventful life. I read an email this morning that took me back to October 2005, right there like I never left—that cruelly sunny afternoon I spent with my dying mother and a "Dear John" note. A friend is going through something similar to what I was going through at the time, and they asked advice on how to go on, how to make breathing feel like less of a gasping effort.

What I wouldn't have given to have had the answer.

Nothing hit me as hard as my life crumbling to pieces at my feet. I was broken. I remember the feeling of being undesirable and unwanted all too well, and I spent too many nights praying that I wouldn't wake the next day. There was something very close to the stitching of my self worth about that particular cut, and I was a shell of a friend, of a daughter, of a person.

But, as Aunt Brenda predicted, Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Once the haze of hurt thinned, all I could think was, "Hadn't I earned more respect than that?" I had. And, finally, I found the desire to look forward, closing the curtain on my vigil of the past.

My friend said they read from the archives of this site and surmised, "I see it was for the best for you, it really was." Take time to grieve. You are mourning the loss of something that was living not so very long ago. Open your eyes to the wealth of love and care around you, open them more quickly than I did...you are ending a chapter, not your story. You go on to be a great conqueror of that which will try to hold you back, and you will redefine happily ever after to a splendor you didn't know to dream. It will be best for you too. You will make it so.