It was my dad’s birthday this past weekend and he asked my mom and I to sit down with him and watch a concert of his favorite band, U2. The performance was in Paris and it had been postponed due to the terrorist attacks in November.

The concert was stirring, nothing less than powerful. The lead singer, Bono, spoke of his own experience with grief and it spoke to everyone there, as it did to me.

“Grief is like a wound that never fully closes. I am still feeling it and I was 14 when my mother left me, but she left me an artist and this wound became an opening into another world.”

His words pierced into me as I thought of my sister, my best friend, whom I had lost three years ago to cancer. My wound for her is still raw, and I can hardly believe it has been three years. When she left me, I could feel myself sink into a pit of darkness and it felt like there was a heaviness pressing upon me. My only relief was writing. As time stretched on, the pain inside me opened my eyes to new things.

I watched Bono perform “Iris”, a song dedicated to his mom, as star constellations were projected onto the screens around him. His lyrics were so familiar to me, the sound so haunting. So many times I have looked up into the sky for comfort, searching for guidance and for her. So often I am stung with the aching of missing her, and Bono names this: “The ache in my heart is so much a part of who I am” He says, “I’ve got your life inside of me.”

“The darkness just lets us see who we are,” Bono reminds us in the chorus. How true this is. Grief threatened to take me over, and my strength was challenged, my spirit called into question. Would I let this beat me? Would I give myself completely to it and let it control me, define me?

The last verses speak of Bono’s memories of his mother, “Iris standing in the hall, she tells me I can do it all.” I broke here. Emillee was my biggest cheerleader, always reminding me the truth about who I am. How I have missed that. The last phrase Bono repeats saying, “She said, ‘Free yourself to be yourself, if only you could see yourself. Free yourself to be yourself, if only you could see'.” I can hear Emilee whispering these words to me, asking me to see what she saw in me, to love myself, as she loved me.

It is a battle. My grief frustrates me, slows me down, and throws me off. I struggle to remember who I was before. Even more so, I fight to remember who I was with Emilee. I was always my best self with her.

But I have promised her that I will fight. I will fight against the pain. I will continue to live, no matter how hard it is without her, and to be kind and patient with myself. I will fight to make her proud, to live out the person she saw in me.To fight to free myself, to be myself, to see what she could see.

Thank you, Bono, for reminding me of the beauty that comes from loss, the beauty of a persistent spirit, and of a soul forever changed.