Like all families, our family has had to contemplate loss of late. I think within my own extended family, a precious uncle passed away in 2017, and Sarah’s grandmother died last year. I’ve had others who I have the privilege of sharing life with lose loved ones in the recent past. I recall a work colleague who experienced five key losses in one 12-month period.
As the family gathered around a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a great grandmother, a sister and dear friend, there were several dynamics at play that sheet home the significance of time in this world—spending the time we can with our loved ones before their time is up.
There was the scenario of a granddaughter with her one children who was unable to attend due to illness. This was heartbreaking for her, for her parents, and for grandparents who are also great grandparents—and yet, this precious niece made the right call to sacrifice much for the health of her Gran.
Another granddaughter made an extraordinarily special trip interstate with her husband and children to be there at the occasion, yet there is only so much time that can be given at short notice when lives and livelihoods are considered.
A sister-in-law lost her father several years ago, and that loss is intensely felt today within the family. An aunt is a widow, and her husband is still missed. For a brother, there’s a life-threatening condition. For another aunt and uncle and our cousins, like for our family, there’s the loss of what strokes do to create challenges for recovery. There are the health challenges that prove loss-worthy, those that come with age—once you turn 50, the wilfulness of youth (even one donut too many with routine regularity) catches up with you.
I could go on, and I do sense that I’ve missed a few significant losses in trying to depict what occurs in all families. While I think of it, I honour your loss, for that depth of empty longing you carry.
Time of a sense evaporates into the ether and there are bound to be regrets for us all—it’s all part of the grieving process, however unfair it is, there are things we would all do differently.
Yet, regret is something we commonly think is a lonely curse lamented by ourselves alone. It isn’t. The regrets for time better spent are endured by us all.
And yet, there’s the real sense that even with a plethora of time, there is still the need to say goodbye in a life where none of us live forever. We sit there knowing we should do and say everything we can, while we have the opportunity, but even if we were to do that, we’d quickly find that there is still a clawing intimacy gap that we cannot bridge.
Life is littered with goodbyes, whether it’s having to say goodbye to a husband and father, or wife and mother, each week (or for longer) as they fly away to work, or it’s something a little or a lot more permanent.
Even when there’s time, there’s not enough time. There’s something unimaginably and innumerably intangible about time and the human experience of life.
We routinely go about the living of our lives without a thought or care regarding loss until it smacks us between the eyes of our heart in grief—then we realise it changes our lives.
And that’s a clue. Grief calls us to an attention we’re otherwise asleep to. It rouses us to the important things, to teach us to live from the mode of loss backwards, so we do now what we cannot do later.
But even in that we can’t have everything we’d want. The goal of life is to accept what we cannot change while attempting to change what we can. We’re destined to fail often.
Still, I’d take the depths of grief for the depths they’ve taught me, however hard they make life to be. Am I afraid of the thought of experiencing future losses? Not so much the experience as the sorrows of irreversible loss; the desiring to return in time to what was.
Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash
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