Losing someone is never going to be easy.
And people will lie,
or try to comfort you,
and say that time heals all things.
But, they are wrong.
Time doesn’t heal.
It just suppresses what you’re always going to feel.
Because after someone you love leaves,
you can pretend not to care,
and maybe eventually you will forget.
But one day you’ll find something that they left behind,
and your mind will remind you that you never forgot about that person.
And then your heart will begin to have that familiar ache in the place where that person should be.
Pain is not forgotten,
it is put aside for another time,
waiting to make its reappearance,
and you feel your heart break all over again.
Poetry
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I have lost several people in my life. My beloved grandparents all withered and died before my eyes, from cancer (2005), dementia (2016), and Parkinsons (2017) going from vibrant, loving, fun people to dry husks. I still find mementos from them, cards, little gifts, or a ribbon from flowers at their funerals, or hear a song that was played in those rough last days and it takes me to them. I have to choose to remember them sweetly, to think to a time when we were healthy and happy and together. Of course it’s a deep ache to know you can’t just pick up the phone and call them for a chat, but for us Christians, we know we’re going to get to see each other again eventually, and that is a soothing thought when the missing them gets to be noisy in my head and heart.
There’s a different hurt that comes with losing someone who is still living. That, I think, takes years to dull. I experienced what could be described as a whirlwind romance with a guy back in 2007. We got engaged after about a year of knowing each other. His sister convinced him that I was manipulating him and that I was some kind of terrible person. I didn’t know what to do– how do you apologize for something you aren’t doing? If you deny it, you’re manipulating the situation to your own benefit. If you apologize, you’re confessing to something that doesn’t exist. He chose to listen to her and pushed me out. I was heartbroken. We had started planning a life together and this all happened inside about a semester’s worth of time (we were still in school, so you can imagine how my GPA suffered) … I wanted to kill myself, I was so upset. Fortunately, I went home instead. And it took a long time to feel even remotely normal. I thought for a while we might reconcile, but ultimately I blocked him on all fronts and worked on purging my life of him. I had cut my hair a certain way because I knew he liked it, so I even had to deal with looking at that in the mirror until it grew out! Four and a half years later I was with someone new (and had better hair). I was a way better and stronger person, knit together from those broken weepy shards that I’d been all those years ago. I unblocked him a few years back, and I don’t feel any emotion if I happen upon an old photograph or a social media post from back in the day.
So time does heal. Really, eventually, it does. But you must put effort into healing too. Confronting the pain may help, talking through the pain, writing through it, moving it from something destructive into something creative. Some of the best work is tribute work.