The Loss of a Loved One

2022-10-27 · essays

Embedded within our short existence, I find nothing quite as cruel as the loss of a loved one. Whether it be a death, a divorce, a falling out, a breakup, or a gradual slipping away, we find ourselves unquestionably aware of the pain of absence, the despair of nothingness.

To lose someone is to break a promise that the future as you have so confidently defined it through the present will continue unaltered, and suddenly, vacations drift away. Candlelight dates burn out and that lingering naivety that we call hope fades into the one certainty that nothing lasts. You were an idiot for believing that this could continue and that you could possibly make plans when nothing is guaranteed.

In their absence, you find that it is even the simple act of making plans of imagining a future that reopens the wounds of grief.

This isn't right to continue without them. The sun still rises, and the birds still sing, but you do not forget. What is the point of living in a world without them? The earth is a little less colorful. Your memories of that one place that you could reliably turn to for comfort are still tinged by their ghostly presence. Sometimes at your weakest and loneliest of ours, you stay a little longer. You enjoy their laugh, their touch, their way of seeing things.

For some fleeting time, you escape from it all. Perhaps you can live in those memories with them, but you know that your love wasn't limited to who they were rather, you loved them, for who they could also be, and for that which you had not yet experienced with them.

Your memory is an unsatisfactory collage of someone who is no longer there. It is their potential that you both share that you grieve and the promise of this potential is now gone.

And so your nostalgic yearning for their existence will never entirely satisfy you. Where could you turn? Should you turn anywhere?

Maybe you go on dates to forget. Your friends said it was a good idea. Maybe you pick up a sport to make friends. Maybe you volunteer somewhere. Maybe you numb it all in a bottle and a few puffs, but the stealthy essence of grief will strike no matter what sort of defensive steps you've decided upon. In the kitchen, as you wait for the water to boil at 3 am sweating. In your empty bed. It all hits you, that overwhelming flash of images and sounds, an audio-visual flash grenade of everything that no longer is she.