Reflection on loss – family, mortality
The Compassionate Friends is clearly a great organization, and I'm pleased to help the Salem chapter out with their website and emails, but I've never attended a support meeting. I've never lost a child or brother or sister or niece. Both of my parents are still living and doing fine, as are my sister and brother. I can't really imagine the experience of losing someone in my immediate family, though I do remember somewhat how it felt to come home one day in the first grade and find out my mother had been in a terrible car accident and nearly died. And I do remember having bad dark dreams as a young child in which my mother was deathly ill and I felt abandoned, alone. It was a cold, almost paralyzing feeling.
When a personal love relationship of ten years ended for me in 2008, I felt destroyed, and at times thought it would have been better if the person I loved had died, because then it would not somehow be my fault. It would not feel like a choice outside my control, made by someone else I cared for, to not be part of my life any longer. Of course this was just a thought I had. I don't know if it's true beyond the feeling of loss I was experiencing at the time.
In 2009, my father had a near-fatal heart attack, and at first it seemed likely my family would have to go on living without him. But then he miraculously recovered, and we did our best to put that thought aside.
All of my biological grandparents are no longer living. The last one passed on in 1997. That was a great loss, but not the same as it would be to lose someone I grew up with, seeing nearly every day, a part of my basic family unit. I wished I could have known my grandparents better. But I was too young.
Some day I will lose someone close. It will probably be sudden and unexpected. Perhaps I will see them for the last time in a hospital, and be allowed to say goodbye. And someday I will pass on.
People sometimes talk about living each day as if it were our last, but can we really live that way? Wouldn't that be a terribly morbid attitude to hold? Somehow, I feel maybe it is healthier to live each day as if there will be many more to come, because any one day is all we ever have, but no one day is so important that it could be more than just a day in a lifetime. At the same time, we should never take the people we have in our lives for granted. Each time we say goodbye might be the last time.
