I don’t know if I will ever understand the grieving process.
People die every day, and I go on living like nothing has changed. Almost
everyone does. But the sad thing is that you’ll never understand how it feels
to lose a loved one until you actually have.
It’s hard to internalize how losing one person can make your
whole world stop. As cliché as that phrase is, there’s no better way to say it.
Things just stop. It’s even harder to understand how everything and everyone
can keep going when you haven’t been able to shift the subject of your thoughts
to anything else for days.
What’s most
frustrating for me is that there’s no way to convey how someone who has passed
has made you feel or what they have meant to you. You can show pictures and
tell stories, but it’s impossible to transfer all of your life experiences and
encounters with this person to someone else. There is literally not one person
who can fully understand what somebody means to you. This can make you feel
alone, and that’s another thing that you can’t understand unless you’ve been
there.
The idea of empathy is hard for me to grasp. It’s easy to
tell somebody that you’ve gone through the same thing as them when they are
grieving, but nobody can ever truly mean that. Nobody can know a person the way
that you do. No one has the memories that you do, and nobody can say that
they’ve felt the same things as you when you’ve been with or without that
person. Each person’s memory is unique and special, so I guess you can say that
the one you’ve lost has had a unique and special impact on everyone that
they’ve ever encountered. You can say that there are no two people who have
felt the same kind of happiness or joy from this person, and that makes their
memory even more special. They have found a way to individually and personally
change people’s lives in completely different ways. This is not specific to one
person though, it’s how all relationships are. There will never be a
relationship that is exactly the same as another. That’s amazing to me. People
are the same. Like snowflakes. They can be alike, but the small details are
what set them apart and makes each of them so uniquely beautiful and
surprising. So in a way, that relationship is unique and personal to you.
Nobody can share that. Your grief is the same. It’s your own, and nobody can
ever understand what your loss means.
I don’t know what I’m trying to get at here. Maybe I’m just
trying to wrap my head around the idea of being completely alone in the
grieving process. Or maybe I’ve stumbled upon something amazing.
All of our experiences with a loved one may differ, and our
loneliness is personal and unique, but that’s something that we all share. Our
solitude is what binds us. Even more, our memories of these loved ones bind us.
I find comfort in that. And although there might not be much that we can do for
ourselves, there’s one thing that we can do for each other and those who have
passed.
Remember.
Our collective
feelings and memories of these people are what make their lives so meaningful.
They keep them alive, and they can bring comfort to the others who have been
touched by these individuals.
I don’t think there’s anything more that we can do to honor
those who have passed than to share our experiences. And though the grieving
process is hard, and nobody wants to deal with loss, there is one marvelous
thing that can come from the loss of a loved one. Unity. The coming together of
strangers to celebrate the life of one person.
And I hope that we can achieve that. It would be a shame if
nothing good ever came from such heartache.
I hope that we can come together, honor these people who have
passed, and celebrate their lives and the people that they were. Because they
deserve it, and so do we.
