Part Two concerning LOSS
DEATH AND GAPS
"There is no death, daughter. People die only when we forget them, my mother explained shortly before she left me.' If you can remember me, I will be with you always." Isabel Allende, Eva Luna
DEATH AND GAPS
By Lynn Marie Ramjass May 31, 2021
It is my experience during these significant losses, our thoughts are so convoluted, our feelings so out of whack, voices and sounds garbled, far and away, as though we are underwater and drowning. It is difficult to think straight or at all. The pain, the dark void in the loss particularly during the initial shock and again during the funeral. The incredible exhaustion that envelopes the mind, heart, and spirit afterwards, and especially the soul sucking pain.
Our experiences are our greatest teachers. I have come to know and understand loss, grief, sorrow, a primal pain deep in one’s soul when a loved one dies, or a close relationship ends. A light extinguishes in our universe. A part of us dies too, as death changes people.
There is a gap, an ever-present hole, and try as we might, will forever remain. We are changed!
British author Jeanette Winterson wrote: “You’ll get over it. Its the cliches that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life forever. You don’t get over it because “it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?”
Death and gaps are topics I think of often and have since I was a child.
I often wonder though, if a sudden death be more merciful and kinder for those who died as well as for those left behind, rather then watching them whither and die in excruciating pain for days, weeks, months, and some sadly, even years at a time.
I imagine the pain, we who are left behind experience would not be any less intense either way, suddenly or via prolonged suffering. Is the loss not the same dreadful pain none the less, and the gap in our lives just as deep?
If they were suffering horribly, would it not be selfish of us to want them to continue to suffer? When someone is taken from us without warning, it can often leave us with regrets for things possibly left unsaid and unresolved.
If nothing else, this Covid 19-pandemic is a reminder that life is indeed fragile and short and any one of us can be taken at any time. There truly is little time to say the things we need and ought to say to people we care about whilst they are alive. Words matter little after we have died. Words have the power to comfort and to heal, to wound and to destroy.
It is my experience that when we truly, genuinely love someone, no matter what type of love that be, we accept that individual as they are and not how we imagine, expect, or hope they will be. We do not try to fix them, or save them, or change them, or mold them into a copy of oneself, how we live, or view the world. We meet them where they are at. We accept their beauty, goodness, and light as well as their faults, idiosyncrasies, shadow, and imperfections. We love and accept them, their brokenness, and their uniqueness precisely as God had made them, perfectly imperfect.
D. H. Lawrence wrote: “It’s no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You’ve got to stick with it all of your life. Only at times, at times the gaps are filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them.”
Anais Nin also wrote about gaps:” I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why; some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.”
I strongly suspect you will understand and relate to those passages, to the times when the gaps are filled in, or left behind.
All these years, as the circle of life continue, and we edge closer to the grave. The final chapter of my life drawing ever closer to its conclusion. I wanted you to know that I will always be grateful for your having been such an important part of it. How thankful I am for the many moments with you when the gaps had been filled in.
Sincerely,
Lynn Marie Ramjass
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