LIVING WITH DEATH
I watched and listened as I seen your world coming to a place I knew would bring sadness. It came to a screeching halt, of sorts, for you. I knew it was coming the day you mentioned “hospice.” Yet I could not be the one to tell you what may lie ahead. You had to walk that path for yourself on your own. You lost a part of yourself, a part that you were not ready to lose. As your friend all I could do is be there, listen, give you a shoulder, and allow you your process of loss.
Life’s struggles rudely interrupted your living with death. Living with death is something we do each day, yet we are not taught to think of it that way. We really don’t think of it until we have someone in our life is confronted by an illness, accident or horrible disease that changes the way we are living. Sometimes it’s us instead of someone else. It interferes with our daily tasks, working, comings and goings. It reminds us how little we actually control. It reminds us of what we do have. It reminds us how short our lives are. Life’s struggles remind us to let go.
RAW EMOTIONS
Now, you are raw, too many unfamiliar emotions hitting you, pinging around inside your soul, bouncing off of your broken heart only to ping back again and again and again, while your mind is wandering, so many thoughts, in between your soul is searching, for what, you may be asking yourself, and your heart is aching, with no release, with no answers, only more tears and more questioning…..
….for the closure that you will not find, not now anyway but maybe somewhere down the road, at some other point in your life, maybe, maybe not.
It is not ours to know what lies ahead but only to have what is here, now, in this moment.
Life’s struggles rudely reminded you of that.
GRIEFS FAMILIARITY
Grief is something so many of us are all too familiar with. Life seems to get ruder by the year. More ways people are lost. More ways to kill one another. More easily to kill ourselves. Prescription drugs meant to help heal which end up being abused and harming someone we love. The mass of bullets that are easily sent into the air over rage, hate or fear but cannot be recalled and end up slicing into the lives of ordinary everyday people, students, teachers, co-workers, grocery clerks, movie goers, young, old, and in between, whoever the target may be. The diseases like covid that ravage a community of all its elders and anyone else that is easily taken down like a domino in a game of stack em up and watch em fall. I could go on because there are so many ways life happens to us that we cannot control.
So much loss. So much grief. So much outside of ourselves that life throws at us.
MEMORIES OF LOSS EQUALS GRIEF
I remember my best friend as she looked at me out the back window of the car with her own bawling face, both of us not knowing if our friendship would not survive the distance when parents’ divorce and part ways. I have no idea where she is or how she’s doing. I lost her friendship due to adults’ inability to amicably part ways.
I remember looking at the hospital as the car pulled away holding on to a pink bunny my mother had bought me to replace the baby I should have been holding, knowing my first born would have another mother. I lost him due to parents’ inability to love all races and their bigotry cost me that relationship.
I remember hearing the sorrowful voice of a familiar friend who rarely called me, on the phone one day trying to tell me of my only adult best friend’s passing as I struggled to hold the phone. Yet grateful I had just seen her a few months before and she was doing well. Her heart had suffered too much damage from all of the previous drug use as an addict. She left quietly in her sleep but left two young sons behind. I lost her friendship due to illegal drug use that remains rampant in this world.
I remember seeing the message on my phone while working one day that told me my father was gone. Just like that. No more. Gone. No goodbye. No hug. No last talk. Just gone. Not my mother who we thought we would lose and had prepared for but him instead. No preparation. I lost him because his heart was old, tired and he passed sleeping in his chair.
LIFE CANNOT PREPARE US FOR IMPACT OF LOSS
I thought I had prepared myself to lose my mother. There is no way to prepare. You cannot prepare yourself for the struggles that life will bring. Even when you know they are coming.
All of these had their shock to my system, reverberating through my entire being every morning when I woke up for quite some time afterward, physically, mentally, emotionally, and even spiritually. They all made an impact on my outlook one way or another. There is where I did have control. How I would allow it to affect me, my life, my heart, my soul and the ripples that it would carry out to those that my life touched.
Grief has many stages and there is no one way it is experienced. Some of us only go through a few stages, some all of them and even yet still some may even get stuck in one. Some of us may go back and forth for quite a while. It is a very personal experience and one we can only hope to find a way through and a way to cope with so that we may eventually get to the other side, where it still saddens us but doesn’t hurt quite so loudly.