I had a wonderful visit with my sister and my mother in Austin over the weekend.... although, yet again, returning to the silent emptiness of the apartment challenged my coping abilities.  However, here I am, still alive the next day, with all the challenges and blessings that constitute a life.  I only wish that the gaping hole in my heart would heal and that the anguish of loss would relinquish its authoritative dominance of my life's boundaries.  Scar tissue and the elegies of memory: these things I expect and even want. However, they lie, I guess, in my future.  For the present, I still have not moved much beyond the derailing immediacy of December, 2009.  I am still waiting for the presence of absence to evolve into the absence of presence.  In the latter case, I would have grief.  In the former, where I am now, the grief still has me.  Feeling loss differs from feeling lost.  At least I hope so.