LOSS
All of us have suffered loss in life. We've lost our skates, our pet, the lead in the school play, a game, a job, or some thing or someone very important to us. Grief is different for each loss that occurs because each thing means something different to you. Losing your favorite sweater can be temporary and less important than losing your car keys.
How do you judge grief? It must be by the gravity of loss to you.
I've lost a marriage, friends, aunts, cousins, my father, a sibling, and a child. I didn't place these in order because one can be as bad as the next depending on the distance and the depth of the relationship. Each loss made me someone else, not the same person I was before the loss occurred. Some losses are so difficult and cut so deep that they re-shape you from the inside out.
My mother is the strongest woman I have ever known. When my sister died, it dismantled her. Losing a child is completely devastating because it uproots you from your tether to the world. You will never be the same again because you will come to understand that nothing is forever and you could not protect them from it. My child wasn't even a fully formed person yet but that did not alter my grief at all. When my grown daughter and I were estranged for several years, I listened when my mother said it would change and we would come back together. I listened to her because she knew that there was always that chance as long as we both drew breath.
Loss will also teach you to love and let go in ways you could not fathom before it happened. It can make you stronger but it can also devastate you so much that it changes who you are as a person. So we make a choice which way we're going to go - crawl in that hole that grief creates and hurt and let that grow and make you smaller and less or believe that there is a way to go on, or something more to learn, or someone else who needs you.
Lend your experience or your hope or your courage out to others. Tell people you made it through and they can too. Remind them that not that it may not be this day or tomorrow or next week but some time in the future, there will come a moment that makes them glad they chose to go on. A friend experiences the same loss. Your sister has a baby. Your story about those last moments helps someone else believe that they will survive it. Not everyone does, but enough do. Let it be enough.
Don't dim your light. Too many people need it. Your story continues.
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