Rosanne Cash

I've learned something subtle about loss and love: Love survives loss. Relationships don't die; they just change. In some ways I'm closer to my parents now that they are gone... With my dad, I've felt it plenty of times. Once, I got into a taxi and I could smell his aftershave. I felt a sense of being very present and feeling love in that moment. Or I'd walk into a store and hear my dad's music playing. That happens all the time, but sometimes it will be a particular song or line that's meaningful to me at that instant. Things happen to remind me that my parents are still around, that they care about me.

Having experienced the death of my father, I didn't have that gut-wrenching shock when my mother died because I knew I could survive the death. I was stronger. But that didn't make the intensity of the grief any less. Since my parents died so close together, it was like a one-two punch. I was walking into walls for the first six months after my mom's death. But my mother's death didn't require the same emotional discipline that my father's had. She was a very private person, so I was able to grieve for my mother with more ease than I did with my father.

I'm looking forward to getting past the first anniversary of my mother's death. Everybody said, "It'll take a year" when my father died. I didn't know what they were talking about until I got through that first year. The weight lifted a bit after the first anniversary of my dad's death, and I said, "Oh, I get it." It takes a year because you have to go through every first holiday and birthday without them, and then the first anniversary of their death. Once that's done, you feel like you've completed the most intense part of the cycle.

In the privacy of my own home, I grieve, and remember, like everyone else... I have my father's private desk that he used every day in his little office. He taped the edges with gauze because he kept banging the sharp corners into his knees; diabetics have to be careful of their skin. So I kept the gauze on the corners. I love that desk; to me, it just signifies him.

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