I wasn’t a writer before he died.

But grief turned out to be the great word maker.

A great obliterator.

It shook me to get these words out.

When grief found me inconsolable it gave me a pen and said write your way out, console yourself. Get yourself beyond the insanity. @SecondFirsts (Click to Tweet!)

But I didn’t write anything the first four years.

I had a diary, and wrote some of these words there.

But nowhere else.

The words started to stuck up. And up and up.

All of a sudden they started to spill out.

The words taught me that there was no going back to who I was.

Only who I could become.

A mixed blessing, that grief is.

Isn’t it?

Grief imposes itself on our DNA.

Did you know?

The becoming after grief is unstoppable. It unlocks us from the old life and throws the new keys across the far away horizon.

Where we have to search, adjust, write our way to them. We start the quest towards the keys we never wanted.

All we seek to find is a way to break back into the old life.

At first we think it is possible. So we ask and scream, and yell.

But all we hear are the echoes of never again.

I remember when I realized that what happened was permanent.

You would think it was the first months or even years.

But it was much later.

There are things only time can show us.

My daughters’ loss of their dad was so vast and so destiny binding that I only managed to see its havoc as time moved us forward.

On our way to finding the new keys.

I had to travel nearly 12 years into the future to see what never again meant.

I saw birthdays, kindergarten, elementary, middle and high school graduations.

I saw house moves. Health scares. Aging.

And life happening for a long time before I felt the permanence of never.

Never means eternity.

You see now?

Only words can capture what really happened.

Without them, all of it would be lost on the way to the new horizon.

The words kept track of all my nevers and made my new becoming a little more familiar.

May your nevers be captured along the way to your new keys as well.

With new keys and thousands of nevers,

Christina

Christina Rasmussen is the creator and founder of The Life Reentry Institute, Second Firsts, The Life Starters and Star Letters. Christina is on a crusade to help millions of people rebuild, reclaim, and relaunch their lives using the power of their own minds. Christina’s work has been featured on ABC News, NPR, The White House Blog, and MariaShriver.com. She is the bestselling author of Second Firsts: Live, Laugh, and Love Again, which has also been translated in Chinese and German and is currently working on her second book on expanding the mind in ways that allows co-creation with the forces of the universe. She is also writing her first work of fiction: a science fiction story about a woman on a quest to start over and begin a new life. You can find more information on her website and follow her on FB or Twitter.

Image courtesy of Artem Bali.