I'm in grief, but I can't find a group. I need a grief group. I've called several places, and nothing is fitting. The woman with the patient lovely voice at Holy Cross would love me to come to her grief group, but that would require my cheerful younger son to become less cheerful due to a longer commute every Wednesday evening. I have no answer. Perhaps I will go grieve with the lovely-voiced woman when my Wednesday evenings free up in May. Then again, I'm grieving now.

And because I'm in grief, I'm not doing very well with figuring out how to organize my grief. My clearest reaction to the grief group issue is to note that my internet searches are now turning up notices for grief groups done to yoga. Grief yoga. Would this be hot yoga, would one think? I know that you find the idea of grief yoga awfully amusing. You're nodding, skepticism lining your forehead and knowing sparks twinkling in the deep brown eyes. You're about to say something about aromatherapy. I hear it. It makes me feel better, warmer.

Because we both know that I'm trying to hold you closer now. The lovely grief woman, who I hope would not ask me to do yoga, told me on the phone that they believe that grief is an expression of love, and they work to help people in need learn to bring that love into themselves and make it a part of them. When she said this, I started to cry, of course.

But I have been trying it. Lovely Grief Lady and my dear friend Laura both gave me the idea that you can still be with me. That it's okay to feel your presence, that I don't have to whirl my mind into circles trying to decide if I'm feeling my own longing or a memory or a common memory or you. It feels like I'm cheating on my rational secular self, but I've been letting myself into that space. When my chest aches and rises with feeling, I tell myself that you are with me. You get to have this, I say, to us both. Be here.

You'd want that, damn it all. I went to the place where I saw you last, when your eyes teared and you turned away as I felt my hand on yours for the last. Friends, I'd said, unless you wanted to talk about ways for it to be different. You were past that. You were probably dying, already then, but we didn't know, or I didn't. Your eyes wept and you'd blurted of another day to talk. We didn't. We never did. You died. And as my mind and my soul and every bit of me screams that it was all still there within me, waiting for you to talk, some part of me wails back that you'll stay with me now, always.

You're not there on that bench, where I saw your sad face last. You don't want that. You want to be with me, as you always did. Right now, as my chest aches and tears stream, the second, third time today, you tell me you want to live in me. That's where you'll be happy.

I want it. I want you here. It's helped today to think it, to think that I'm making myself a better home for you.