"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." -Robert Frost
Standing graveside on that cold October day, I thought my life was over. There was a war going on, and everything we knew was being destroyed around us, my wife was gone, our two children were robbed of their lives as well. Watching first Danijela's coffin, then the two small white ones that held our babies as they were lowered into their freshly dug graves, I wanted nothing more then to crawl in on top of them, to protect them there as I'd failed to do on this earth. As awful as it seems now, I prayed too, for a sniper's bullet to find me in those final moments I had with them, for I couldn't imagine walking away and leaving them alone, but far worse, I couldn't imagine my life without them. I failed them, in life, and in death, and it wouldn't have mattered how long I had stood watch over them, that fact would never change.
I wrapped myself in my grief as if it were a blanket in those early days, isolated myself from anyone who tried to offer the comfort I knew I didn't deserve. At first I hid from sleep, fearing the dreams that would force me to relive those fateful hours, then in later days I begged for it, hoping but failing to call up even earlier, happier memories. I became a zombie, moving through my days as a mere shadow of the man I once was, convinced that I had nothing left to live for.
If you were to ask me for the exact moment when things changed I couldn't tell you, I only know it came slowly for me, first in seconds, eventually minutes, then one day I smiled again. It took longer for me to see farther then a day ahead, but, slowly that came too, and only then did I truly accept that life did go on. As much as I might have thought it had stopped for me, it never did, it was what I made of it, but, it took me much longer to see that.
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