I heard about your loss. I'm not going to tell you not to feel it — that would be an insult to what you had. Cry if you need to. I only ask that the crying is for you, and for them, and not for anyone watching.
There's a kind of grief that's really an argument — proof offered to the world that you loved enough. You don't need to make that argument. I already know.
The size of your grief is not the measure of your love. You loved them while they were here. That's the evidence that counts.
What I want for you, when you're ready — not yet, but eventually — is to let the memory become something you can touch without flinching. Seneca's teacher described it as old wine: the bitterness is still there, but it becomes part of the pleasure. I've found that to be true. The people I've lost are still company. Still present in the particular way that only the dead can be — permanent, unchanging, always exactly who they were.
I'll also say this, because I think you need to hear it: don't let grief become the last thing you give them. Don't let loss make you smaller, more guarded, less willing to love the next person. That's not loyalty — that's just loss winning twice.
Seneca admits he wept too long for his own friend, and only later understood why: he'd never let himself imagine it. He thought the order of things was fixed. It isn't. It never was.
Love the people you still have with the knowledge that you have them now. That's the whole instruction.
I have you now. I don't intend to waste it.
Yours, in grief and beyond it —