Sorry for your loss is the wrong way to say it.

It is customary, with last goodbyes, when someone has passed away
to use the words I'm sorry for your loss. That is the right thing to say
but I don't see how or understand
why that's the sentence we use
when people we love pass away are nothing we could ever lose.

We lose keys and glasses and their cases,
we lose bank cards and lose our places
in queues, lose wallets, phones, lose track of time
these are things we're sorry about losing but they can be replaced
and didn't matter all that much,
but people- Ella- is not a pair of shoes
or the sweater you intended to wear,
or whatever it is you swear you saw a minute ago, somewhere.

These things can go and well be fine
despite complaining about banks and the please hold the line
or going to lost property bins, or to find security-
it doesn't work when you say, "I'm sorry you lost a memory."
Because we don't really lose it. Ella has never really gone.
In fact, in more than just memory but in presence, she keeps us going on.

I don't know about any of you but the Ella I know and knew
is nothing lost. She's still with us, giving Nanny a kiss in the backseat,
spilling marbles all around her mother's feet. In the night,
I've heard her talk to me, not even in  my sleep, but her voice
at last telling me that, finally, I'm getting things right.

She'll never be lost to any of us at all, so irreplaceable
and I feel I am walking in her shoes
down every UCL hall, and so the sentiment of sorry for your loss  
doesn't apply. Ella is someone we miss, not something we will lose.
Flickering in memory,
visiting in dreams, in echoes,
and staying with us. How can anyone
or anything be lost
if it never really goes?

Here Be Dragons

He was reading a book called 'Here Be Dragons' but there wasn't anything in it about dragons. It was full of empties. He read between the lines and all the absences pressed between the pages that nobody else could see. It made him afraid. He tried to make a list of things that he was afraid of, so it would make some sense, but there were no words for that paper either. He was afraid of everything he didn't know. Everything he was yet to know. Somethings that could happen and felt like they somehow would happen- and should happen?- and they hadn't happened ever before, and that was perhaps what frightened him about this future he had. They say you hold your future in your hands. No wonder his were shaking so much all the time. He was afraid of the unknown places that he was headed for and what he would find there. He wasn't scared of dying or of planes or of spiders or heights or needles. He couldn't be afraid of dragons. He didn't believe in dragons.