Officer Joseph Paul Sanders

Seventeen years later...
The growth in the life you left behind is incredible!
You might not recognize it, but it would bring you so much joy!
The small branches and buds on the tree of your life and legacy have grown, strengthened each in their own way by your life and death. They are each strong boughs in their own rights now and thrive in their individuality. It is a sight to behold!
The world has been filled with love and laughter because of the lives you brought into it.
Humble, quiet pride would show on your face in its sneaky way. The image of that face brings happiness, yet it simultaneously haunts.
The tears of sadness are replaced mainly by happy tears, born of the good things. The days of aching sobs have disappeared.
The sadness has waned, softened, and become a quieter voice.
But when the time comes to mark each year since your departure, the decrepit skeletal hand of grief can still reach out its lanky fingers and grasp the heart.
It renders the body exhausted.
It renders the mind fogged.
It pierces the heart to bleed again.
It weighs the soul like an anchor, dragging it to the infinite blackness of the deepest depths of the sea.
It calls up a broken, deep aching loneliness for your presence in its corporeal form. A loneliness that begs even for just a minute of you.
It incites the old tears of loss to return.
When it resurfaces, it is accepted with as much grace as possible.
Then, thankfully, it passes, leaving a new layer of strength behind like a broken bone healing.
The world is beautiful for having had you in it.
Your love is indelible.
Forgetting you is an impossibility.

Tondria Sanders

December 8, 2025