Imagine The Moment Someone You Love Suddenly Disappears

Imagine the moment someone you love suddenly disappears.

When that dark day comes, how do you even begin to steady your heart?

In some of my previous articles, I wrote about accepting impermanence and practicing mindfulness.

But if I am being completely honest with you, the one thing I am most terrified of, the one thing I never want to face in my life, is that exact impermanence.

When a person you love deeply is suddenly gone, or even if you knew the specific time of their departure beforehand, the pain of that actual moment is unbearable.

These situations and emotions are incredibly difficult to put into words. It is a natural part of life that every human being must experience — a reality of nature that we simply cannot run away from.

Yet, most people dare not think about the moment they will lose the ones they love. We might tell ourselves that thinking ahead is unnecessary, but the truth is, just the mere thought of it hurts too much.

So, we try our best to push the thoughts away. We choose to live day by day, telling ourselves, “I will deal with the pain only when it happens.”

The Anatomy of Grief

But whether you prepare your mind in advance or not, the moment you lose that person, the pain is so deep that you might literally forget how to live. It might even hit your current life with a massive negative impact.

Why? Because the moments and images of when they were still here will constantly flash before your eyes. Everything you see will feel like a cruel coincidence, triggering old memories.

You will realize they are never coming back, and tears will blur your vision.

You will feel a sharp, stabbing pain in your chest. You might find yourself crying in the corner of a room, clutching their favorite item closely to your chest, overcome with grief.

You will look at their photographs and talk to them just like you used to. You will desperately long for the warmth, the care, the touch, and the kindness you once received from them.

It is, without a doubt, the most painful stage to walk through.

But remember this: as you pass through these agonizing stages, you are directly confronting your loss.

In my culture, we have a saying: “The dead fade as time goes by.”

It means we must be patient and give ourselves time to cross this bridge. It is an encouraging phrase that everyone says.

However, there is something that everyone forgets to say, something we constantly forget to remind each other: if the person you love is still alive and standing right beside you, understand them fully and care for them down to the smallest detail.

Sometimes, the person you love might seem driven by a strong desire to live a luxurious, successful life where they want for nothing. But during that journey, there are moments when they simply need your attention and your warmth.

If you spend every single day exhausting yourself, working without rest to fulfill their materialistic desires, you might become too tired to give them the actual warmth and care they need.

Eventually, this turns into the heaviest regret once they are gone. If you add guilt and regret to the stages of grief, the pain multiplies, and the healing takes much longer.

If things go badly, you might carry that regret with you until the day you die.

Therefore, while you are fighting and striving for your life, never forget to care for and give warmth to the person you love at this very second.

Building a Purpose Beyond Loss

Furthermore, you must establish a meaningful life purpose that goes beyond just the people you love.

What I mean is this: sometimes, when we live only for ourselves, we tend to exist comfortably, day by day, without setting massive goals.

But the moment a person we love enters our life, we take on all kinds of pressure and work incredibly hard just to make them happy, to give them a life better than others. Our resilience grows because of them.

However, if an unpredictable twist of fate takes them away after we have sacrificed so much for them, we often crash.

We declare, “I don’t want anything else in this life without them,” and we completely stop our own growth. Because we had no meaningful purpose other than that person, we let everything we worked for go to waste.

What kind of meaningful purpose should you look for? If you cannot find one based on yourself, you can actually discover it by looking at what the person you loved cared about.

For example, if the person you loved had a deep affection for animals, your purpose could be protecting and caring for stray animals.

If they grew up without the warmth of a loving family, you could work hard to become a major supporter of orphanages and nursing homes, helping others feel the love they missed.

If they passed away from an incurable disease or an illness that was detected too late, you could dedicate your resources to health education or financial support for medical research to prevent others from suffering the same fate.

If you look closely, you will always find a deeply meaningful life goal.

Having a purpose like this will significantly reduce the time you spend drowning in painful grief when you lose someone. Your life, and the hard work you put in while they were alive, will not be like water poured into the sand.

Instead, you will carry their memory forward as you pursue an even bigger mission.

By chasing these meaningful goals, you will create a life of purpose. Time will seem to move faster, and the long, lonely hours of painful sorrow will become much easier to bear.

Losing the ones we love is a law of nature. I close this piece by urging you to accept this truth, and to prepare your heart and your actions for everything that matters while you still have the time.

Thank you for reading.

[This article was originally published on my Medium profile. You can read the original piece here.]