Loss of a loved one

Embedded within our short existence, I find nothing quite as cruel as the loss of a loved one. Whether it be a death, a divorce, a falling out, a breakup, or a gradual slipping away, we find ourselves unquestionably aware of the pain of absence, the despair of nothingness. To lose someone is to break a promise that the future, as you have so confidently defined it through the present, will continue unaltered.

And suddenly vacations drift away. Candle-light dates burn out. And that lingering naivety that we call hope fades into the one certainty that nothing lasts. You were an idiot for believing that this could continue and that you could possibly make plans when nothing is guaranteed. In their absence, you find that it is even the simple act of making plans, of imagining a future, that re-opens the wound of grief.

This isn't right. To continue without them. The sun still rises. The birds still sing. But you do not forget. What is the point of living in a world without them? The earth is a little less colorful. Your memories, that one place that you could reliably turn to for comfort, are all tinged by their ghostly presence.

Sometimes at your weakest and loneliest of hours, you stay a little longer. You enjoy their laugh. Their touch. Their way of seeing things. For some fleeting time, you escape from it all. Perhaps you can live in those memories with them. But you know that your love wasn't limited to who they were. Rather you loved them for who they also could be and for that which you had not yet experienced with them.

Your memory in an unsatisfactory collage of someone who is no longer there. It is their potential and the potential that you both share that you grieve. And the promise of this potential is now gone. And so your nostalgic yearning for their existence will never entirely satisfy you.

Where could you turn? Should you turn anywhere? Perhaps the present? But that still requires some orienting towards the future. You do need to plan things. This again. Where is the motivation to do anything at all?

As Mark Kingwell writes: "One reason people find breakups (and, still more close, deaths) so unsettling and depressing is that they lose at a stroke a person with whom they have become used to planning their diversions, whatever those may be. A future is lost, and so a sense of wholeness or identity, however flimsy and variable."

You get up. You clean the dishes. You sip your coffee. Maybe you go on dates to forget. Your friends said it was a good idea. Maybe you pick up a sport to make friends. Maybe you volunteer somewhere. Maybe you numb it all in a bottle and a few puffs. But the stealthy essence of grief will strike no matter what sort of defensive steps you've decided upon.

In the kitchen as you wait for the water to boil. At 3 am, sweating in your empty bed. It all hits you, that overwhelming flash of images and sounds, an audio-visual flash grenade of everything that no longer is. She has died. He has left. They fell out of love. You could no longer trust them. She dances with another. He embraces another. A single word punches the soul out of your gut: "Gone".

But something feels strangely good about all of this. As some have argued, love can only be felt truly in loss. The profound despair you feel is ever so slightly insightful and even liberating. Maybe you find it slightly addictive. And yes, if you can get through this decrepit state, you just might see it all a little more elegantly. Maybe you see it a little more clearly.

What was lost was a piece of yourself, a former self that has now faded away. You can never fully understand someone else, but you can love someone through sharing yourself and through them sharing themselves. Unfortunately, the self you have shared has perished with them. And, to make it worse you're still stuck with the self they gave you: A self composed of memories and ideas and an essence that you cannot forget. There is no denying this.

But, importantly, what they have given you is still there, alive within you. There is nothing to do other than to honour and accept this. Those days are gone. And who you are is gone. And who they were is gone. But time marches on. Time; the most finite resource. And what better way to honour the loss of someone whose time has passed than to embrace the time you still have with the grace and with that you so desperately wish to give to them?

As Mark Kingwell concludes: "You cannot be happy alone and you cannot be happy together. Mourning mourns the loss of a possible future. The not-yet that now will never be. Everything ends, including you. Love is not eternal, it is not even hardy. Accepting this takes a form and amount of courage that nobody but you will see, or appreciate. You can't change any of this; you have to live with it... Get up. Begin. Make your way from the bed to the shower. Remember that this is the hardest thing you will do all day."