I want to sit down and kinda drift a bit, and have a semi unfocused stream of consciousness to really just… explore death. Not about death itself, but what’s left behind when someone we love slips into the other room.
There is a saying that when someone passes, we aren’t sad because they’re gone, we’re sad because they’re gone from us. On some level I get this, despite the implications of selfishness, because it is true. Although these feelings are not mutually exclusive.
Depending on the nature and nuances of the relationship, we can be sad, angry, guilty, and happy all at once, which just adds to the mess really. Because there isn’t exactly an instruction manual on how to feel. There’s just a run of falling emotional dominoes, each one crashing until, at some moment, the last one falls. Then? There’s simply the before and after. Everything else suddenly feels irrelevant in comparison.
The ability to say or do something to show love, to do some form of “catch up” or “extra credit” homework on a relationship that had taken a backseat. But now reality has checked the receipts and totaled the bill.
And in the afterwards… all we have left are prayers and sentiment. Maybe that’s enough, but far too often it feels our prayers and feelings are just tealights. Each plea, each supplication, a candle cast out into and swallowed by an endless darkness that mirrors the void now within our chests.
A chasm, with no clear direction of how to fill it is now.. present. As if the vacuum of their departure pulled part of us through, leaving us smaller in some inexplicable way.
Regardless of how we express our pain, the raw, tear soaked wails that bring us to our knees, or the silent unboxing of compartmentalized sorrow in solitude, it all comes from the same place. Again, it doesn’t really matter, because these things are coming from us, for us. Ultimately, the only balm that seems to work is time.
Time, spread across internal honesty, through the lens of perspective.
Through that, we find the kind of acceptance that reminds us life doesn’t care about our opinions or feelings.. it just goes on. In acute suffering we look down. We become myopic for a time... our minds seized by the emptiness before us, and ahead of us at the life that now is missing that cornerstone, that parent, that friend, that piece of your heart that once made everything glow like a sacred memory. But eventually we must look up again. We must look up to see that while they may be gone, our road isn’t. We mustn’t let one death become two. Instead, take hold of that memory of them and walk. Don’t die for them... Live for them. Live HARDER because now, because now their memory rides shotgun beside you.
We can feel gratitude. To be grateful for the time we did have, however long it was. That we got to be with them long enough to love them, long enough to miss them, long enough for them to matter to us through all the static noise of the thousands of cuts life inflicts on us each and every day. If we hurt it’s only because they mattered. It’s good to have met someone that truly did.
There will eventually be peace. Yes, in the immediate aftermath, and in quiet echoes years later, there may be conflict, some of which we may forever struggle to reconcile. But that’s okay... In a way you may reach a place where you can almost “Agree to disagree” with yourself. But in time, there will be peace. Because life goes on. The pain will settle.
That void in your chest will never go away, but over time as you fill it with memories, when you gaze into it you will no longer see what you lost.
You’ll see what you were blessed to have.
-KC