When someone you love dies, nothing in life seems to matter anymore. Food loses its taste. Getting out of bed in the morning requires energy you no longer possess. The past becomes a sad movie reel of memories with a character who is now eerily missing, and the future, which had previously beckoned with plans of family vacations, birthdays, graduations, and weddings, now looms emptily and purposeless. You realize that all you looked forward to will now be enjoyed alone.
Trivial matters that you overlooked before become painful reminders of the person who once was. When you go to a restaurant, the hostess asks how many in your party and you automatically reply seven and then have to recalculate—six. When you call their house, their voice asks you to please leave a message on the answering machine. When you see the sweater they always wore, eat their favorite foods, and remember their little idiosyncrasies, you are plunged back into your misery.
Meanwhile all around you are people going along happily with their lives. Some will wake up and lie, cheat, deceive, steal, and inflict pain on others. Why are they still alive? you question. Why are they here, breathing and occupying space, when someone so beloved, so kind, so innocent, is not? Suddenly you see the world through a critical, acerbic lens that magnifies life’s injustice.
Being alone with your thoughts sinks you into depression, so you keep yourself surrounded with people and occupied with errands, books, homework, anything to not think of the death that lurks nonetheless in the back of your mind. And then there comes a lull in your day, and you can run from it no longer—the pain inevitably catches up to you. The terrible truth that they are gone and never will come back sets in.
If you had loved them less, it would not hurt so much now. But you know you would not, if given the chance to change the past, sacrifice one iota of that love to ease your suffering in the present. The reason you cry is not because they are dead but because they made your life so beautiful, because you are so thankful that they were born and you were born and somehow your lives intersected. You realize that you are bloated with tears because you are swelling with love, which is why the sympathy cards, flowers, and care packages that arrive in the mail, so full of love for you and the one you lost, trigger newfound torrents of tears.
The messages inside those Hallmark sympathy cards you receive may at first sound cliché. They may make you angry as you demand how those self-proclaimed prophets can tell you that “your loved one is alive in spirit” when they obviously have never experienced the sheer devastation you feel. But with time, you will come to see that they are true. Death can cruelly cheat you of future time but it cannot take away what has already happened. You will never forget the memories you shared. This is small solace, but it means that the person you loved will never really leave you. They have, in some way, influenced who you are and so as long as you live so will they.
There is no cure for the sadness that comes with death. Time will lessen it, but it will never completely go away. You will always miss them, and in the future, as you take that family vacation, receive your diploma, or go off to college, you will wish that they could be there to see you. But know this: that your sadness comes from a love that is profound and everlasting. In the words of Kahlil Gibran, “When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”
Trivial matters that you overlooked before become painful reminders of the person who once was. When you go to a restaurant, the hostess asks how many in your party and you automatically reply seven and then have to recalculate—six. When you call their house, their voice asks you to please leave a message on the answering machine. When you see the sweater they always wore, eat their favorite foods, and remember their little idiosyncrasies, you are plunged back into your misery.
Meanwhile all around you are people going along happily with their lives. Some will wake up and lie, cheat, deceive, steal, and inflict pain on others. Why are they still alive? you question. Why are they here, breathing and occupying space, when someone so beloved, so kind, so innocent, is not? Suddenly you see the world through a critical, acerbic lens that magnifies life’s injustice.
Being alone with your thoughts sinks you into depression, so you keep yourself surrounded with people and occupied with errands, books, homework, anything to not think of the death that lurks nonetheless in the back of your mind. And then there comes a lull in your day, and you can run from it no longer—the pain inevitably catches up to you. The terrible truth that they are gone and never will come back sets in.
If you had loved them less, it would not hurt so much now. But you know you would not, if given the chance to change the past, sacrifice one iota of that love to ease your suffering in the present. The reason you cry is not because they are dead but because they made your life so beautiful, because you are so thankful that they were born and you were born and somehow your lives intersected. You realize that you are bloated with tears because you are swelling with love, which is why the sympathy cards, flowers, and care packages that arrive in the mail, so full of love for you and the one you lost, trigger newfound torrents of tears.
The messages inside those Hallmark sympathy cards you receive may at first sound cliché. They may make you angry as you demand how those self-proclaimed prophets can tell you that “your loved one is alive in spirit” when they obviously have never experienced the sheer devastation you feel. But with time, you will come to see that they are true. Death can cruelly cheat you of future time but it cannot take away what has already happened. You will never forget the memories you shared. This is small solace, but it means that the person you loved will never really leave you. They have, in some way, influenced who you are and so as long as you live so will they.
There is no cure for the sadness that comes with death. Time will lessen it, but it will never completely go away. You will always miss them, and in the future, as you take that family vacation, receive your diploma, or go off to college, you will wish that they could be there to see you. But know this: that your sadness comes from a love that is profound and everlasting. In the words of Kahlil Gibran, “When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”