When it comes to grief, every era has had its own established ways.
The traditional methods: cemetery, church, candles, family rituals, black clothes, a year of quiet.
For many people this works. The ritual, the order, the structure calms them. And that’s perfectly fine.

 

Then there are the newer approaches: coaches, psychologists, therapists, healers.
They’re all searching for the same thing — a way for someone to learn how to live with what has happened.
And that is also completely fine. Everyone should hold on to whatever works for them.
Grief is not a competition. There is no right or wrong way. There is only a way.

 

What I’m writing here is not advice, not a method, not the one true solution.
I’m not claiming anything. I’m simply telling you what works for me. Maybe it helps someone, maybe it doesn’t.
I’m only describing how Edó stayed present in my life in a way that didn’t break our world apart, only transformed it.

 

We were together for forty-five years. That is an entire life. Losing her was a shocking tragedy. Incomprehensible.
How can this be? Why her?
But after a while, I began to see how much of her remained.

 

Most people instinctively try to “let go,” as if grief were an exam you have to pass as quickly as possible.
The cemetery and the church help many. I understand that.
In my case, it never even came up.

 

For me, death didn’t close anything. It simply shifted our connection onto another channel.

 

I have a photo of her. She took it two weeks before she died — a selfie, even though she had never taken one before.
As if she knew I would need something to hold on to.
This photo comes with me from room to room.
It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t tear anything open. It keeps her present and gives me strength.

 

And here is the essence:
grief, for me, isn’t about letting go — it’s about transformation.
Not about losing my partner, but about how she stays with me in a different way.
She continues in another form. Quieter, but strong and active.

 

But this didn’t happen on its own. I had to build it.
I had to create a world where Edó still has a place — not as décor, not as memory, but as structure.
As the foundation of the project I share with our son.
Milán stands on the front line. I don’t control it; I provide the base, the energy, the experience from which this world was built.

 

I come from the tech industry. It had never crossed my mind to build a literary workshop.
Then I realized that if I wanted Edó to remain present, I needed to build a world where she could remain present.
Not as sadness, but as the driving force of what we are creating now.

 

As we stepped onto this path, the pain slowly transformed into presence.
It didn’t disappear. It changed.

 

People rarely say out loud that this is also an option:
you don’t have to “move on.”
You can find a form in which the relationship continues.
Where love is not an object but energy.
Where the person who died is not absence but foundation.

 

My method is simple:
you build a world where the person you lost still has a place — a very active place.

 

Where they don’t take anything from you; they add to you.
Where the shared past is not a closed chapter but a source of strength.
And from that point on, you are together every day — just differently.

 

There are two songs I often listen to:

 

East: “As long as I live and you wait, we'll sing the survivors’ song.”
Mobilmánia: “I was your fate, your wings, your luck… you were everything, a gift of life.”

 

Those who have lived through it understand it.
Those who haven’t, don’t need to. Everyone grieves in their own way.

 

All I’m saying is this:
you don’t have to let go of the person you lost.
For some people it helps. For others it doesn’t.
For me, continuing, integrating, and keeping her active is what works.

 

Because of that, losing her didn’t close our relationship.
It rewrites it. It keeps transforming it.

 

Someone who loses the most important person in their life does not necessarily lose their own life as well.

 

But they do have to rearrange the world they want to go on living in — the world they want to survive in.

 

With my method, I avoided the hardest trap of all: putting our forty-five years into the past tense.
We continue — slightly differently, but still together.
As East sings: as long as I live, and she waits.