loss

We’re going to lose another person we love. There’s a chance it will happen before the end of the year, which would make that 3 integral people we have lost in 2022. That’s not even counting my mom’s 14-year-old basset hound that had to be put down, or the other people and animals around us that simply aren’t doing well. 

Loss is all around us. And we’re all coping with it differently. We’re all at differing levels of acceptance or denial or heartbreak or despair. I think we’re all exhausted. I keep hearing people say that this “has to be the last one” and that “we can’t go through this again.”

And I feel like the only one thinking… we will. Of course we will. The unfortunate truth is that we all will die. And there is no guarantee we’ll get long lives or easy lives or even happy lives. There is no guarantee we’ll get more Christmases with our grandparents or Sunday BBQs with our cousins or another sunset or time to achieve one last dream. I have never in my life believed more in the power of right now. You hear people say that it’s all you have, but I’m not sure you can fathom it until you’ve experienced sudden loss.

Until this year, my experiences with loss and death were almost non-existent. A great aunt I only had a handful of memories of passed away when I was 6. I didn’t go to the funeral. And not until I was 24 did I start losing my great-grandparents. The first one who died did so with our whole family at home with her, kids running around and playing, adults toasting over beer bottles, all of us getting to take turns holding her hand and saying our goodbyes. She woke up long enough from her morphine nap to take one last look at each of her children huddled around her, and took her last breath as a big full moon was coming up over the mountains. The large group of us formed a circle around her after she was gone and we prayed together, even if most of us stopped going to church ages ago. The whole experience was sad and beautiful and powerful. And I think it colored how I see death today: inevitable, with the potential to feel magical. Transformative. It doesn’t have to be an ending if you have the courage to see it as a new beginning. It’s not about moving forward without a person, it’s about absorbing everything they were and carrying it with you into your next phase of life. It’s like carrying them in a locket; a badge of honor that you had the pleasure of knowing and loving them. Even pain can feel like a gift in the right light.