It might sound more than a little crazy,

but I believe I knew I loved you before I met you.

I think I dreamed her into life.

The words of Savage Garden so describe real love.

That’s how I felt about Galyna.

And before her, Nadira.

Two extraordinary women, both now gone

eight and twenty-four years, respectively

and yet their presence still shapes me.

Not as sorrow, but as a blessing.

I’ve learned something I wish more people would say aloud:

Grief is not the shadow of love.

It is love, continuing.

Not through endurance, but through reverence.

Not survival—but embrace.

People sometimes ask me how I survived it all.

How I kept going.

But that’s not the right question.

The real wonder isn’t that I survived their absence,

it’s that I was lucky enough to know them at all.

That in the vast stretch of time and space, we found each other. That I was seen. That I got to see them.

Ann Druyan, reflecting on her life with Carl Sagan, wrote:

“We never trivialised the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting… But the great thing is that when we were together… we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is.”

That’s the core of it, isn’t it?

The miracle isn’t found in some imagined reunion.

The miracle is that the meeting happened at all.

Galyna and I used to send each other texts from different rooms,

just to say “I love you.”

We’d share coffee breaks like teenagers sneaking out of class.

Even time apart for a few hours felt strange.

We worked together,

parented together,