Grief & Loss

I was thinking about a quote from Doctor Who today, “Immortality isn’t living forever. That’s not what it feels like. Immortality is everybody else dying.” I grew up in a large family. Lots of grandmas and grandpas, aunts, and uncles with loads of cousins. Over the course of my life, I have lost many family members. I wonder if the day will come where I will be the only one left. That is the reality of coming from a large family. It’s an eventuality. When I was younger, I knew, intellectually, that losing family was going to happen. Over the course of my life as more and more people passed on, it became reality. It wasn’t a reality I was prepared for.

Then again, how do you prepare for that eventuality? You really can’t. You don’t know how the loss will affect you. It happens to quickly and you’re left blind-sided. Sometimes, you do see it coming but even then, it’s not what you expected. I am not sure which is worse, sudden, or eventual.

What grief and loss has taught me is that the grief doesn’t go away. It’s not like one day you wake up and you forget. The loss isn’t there anymore. That’s now how life goes. One day you wake up and the loss doesn’t feel so achy. The absence is still there. That absence is what is prevalent. They’re gone and there is nothing you can do about it. Things happen and they’re not there. You find yourself wanting to talk to them, wanting to share a moment but they’re gone. They miss so much.

After a while you come to a place where you keep them alive in your thoughts. In this way, they’re never far but they’re never here. That’s the conundrum.