Loss ... and the gorgeous words that we pound into paper

Michael Kimball. Absorb the name, and let the man's words absorb you:

I went back inside through the back door and walked back to what used to be our bedroom. I was going to take my funeral clothes off, but it felt too difficult to untie my tie or my shoes. It felt too difficult to unbutton my shirt or my pants. I couldn’t take my suit jacket off. It fit a little tight around my shoulders and it felt as if my wife had her arms around me.

My funeral clothes were all that were holding me together then. I was afraid that I would start to forget my wife if I took any of them off.

Kurt Anderson, "Bereft"

That's as far as I read -- my eyes are suddenly closed and straining against an aqua terrycloth robe, a dressing gown that belonged to my mother, who was nine weeks in the ground by then. Mom. Mom. 

I want her, I want one right now. Mom. In a bathrobe, swelling like sea and the sun to lap over your nestling child, the one who trembles ... with joy. 

So that's what it feels like. Quivers within and breathing so deep. Softened; serene. Surface, meet surface ... and sink; you are safe. 

*sinsenor, "Mother Love"

Safe and bereft in her mother's closet, snuffling her softest, favourite bathrobe. A feral orphan claws at the final scent, suckles the last cells of skin, strands leftover hair into her scalp. Stranding; stranded. Nobody's fault but she shakes -- and where is the breast that sustained her? She pulls the dead fur down and falls into the must --

... "My funeral clothes were all that were holding me together then." -- For me, it's my bed, my blankies, my bath and my cats ... and my own arms. Not long ago, a Great Dane whose family I was visiting for the weekend slept with me on a king-sized bed. I awoke at one point (of many) to find my right leg dangling at the knee and my nose about to collide with the edge of the bedside table. The big galoot had me shoved halfway to the floor -- there was no moving the beloved beast (believe me, I tried), so I scooched myself into a form approximating the dog's, and chuckled myself to sleep. I've been craving a big, warm body to nestle with at night ... For the first time in many, many months, I got my wish!