While enjoying a week of solitude and introspection, I awoke
this morning to a Face Book post from a dear friend who lost her son on
Monday. Not misplaced lost, but lost
forever from this good earth. He was
young, 21ish. We were pregnant at the
same time. It is not in my schema to
even fathom the magnitude of her anguish and grief.
Being alone these past few days, I have been awash, grieving the
loss of my brother over a year ago. It
seems fresh almost daily. There are days
when I feel his absence from my life so keenly I want to curl up and wail. I rarely do though. Generally I just muster through, push the
memories to the back and keep moving forward.
This week I have had the unfettered time to sift through the vast store
of memories we shared together and to weep, speak and laugh and even bitch at
him for leaving so damn soon.
Grief is something many of us never spend a great deal of
time considering. Many people, myself
included, believe that losing someone we love is such a distant event that we
are blindsided by loss when it happens. Often
we find ourselves lost in a sea of regret.
Not making time, not answering the phone, not seeing the pain or
loneliness, not remembering the minutia of the last conversation or not saying
the words. The thing is, regret doesn’t do anything except make us
miserable. And if I know one thing to be
true, it is that the people we loved who are gone would not want us to be
miserable. They want us to remember them. To celebrate who they were in our lives. To keep their memories alive, though they are
no longer. To talk about them when we
see or hear something that brings them to mind and to LAUGH! At least that is
what the person I lost would want.
Today, as my dear friend wades through her sea of loss, I
find myself remembering something Emmett
Till’s mother realized when he was
murdered. She said “I realized that this
would be my load to carry. No one can carry it for me, and I will carry it for
the rest of my days.” While this is
certainly true, we all carry the load of our grief individually, with our own
love and shared experiences completely separated from others, I understand
today more than ever that is the compassion and empathy of others in our lives
that make carrying those loads bearable.
People we care about are grieving all around us every
day. Their loss may not be recent, but
the pain of it when it surfaces, always feels fresh and raw. Their grief may not be related to death. They may be grieving the loss of a dream or a
marriage. They need us to stand with
them. To make carrying their load bearable even for a few hours.
The last story my brother told me was about a woman in a
veterinarian’s office who saw that my nephew, his heart breaking, was there to
put their dog to sleep. In his words, “She
was a behemoth of a woman, there with her little ratty mongrel. She just lumbered up out of her chair and
wrapped her enormous arms around Nate and said, Honey, you just go ahead and
cry, I’m so sorry you lost your dog.”
Through his weeping on the phone my brother pointed out that it was such
a great reminder of the healing power people had for each other when they
reached out in raw humanity to experience and share others sorrows and burdens.
Who needs you to stand beside them and walk with them
today?
