Passing

Reading this blog (http://stephanieklein.blogs.com/) made me want to answer her question: how does one go on after losing someone so special, so important to them? I often have thoughts of someone close to me dying. Whether it be my grandmother, my sister, my husband, I can start crying immediately. I know I can get through my grandmother's death. She is 99, after all. But it is the thought of those people who aren't old, of them dying before me when I would rather be the one to go. I don't want to live through that pain.

I have lost people in my life, and a lot of that loss was tragic. My grandfather and great-aunt and most recently "the woman we call grandma" have passed, sadly, but not devastatingly. My young cousin (car accident), my uncle (cancer), my father (again, cancer) died, devastatingly. The last, of course, being the hardest.

How did I get through that time? Then, thinking back, how did he get through losing his brother, his only brother, before his own cancer appeared? How did my 99-year-old grandmother get through losing her only two sons? Grief is so debilitating, how can we be so resilient? I guess our bodies go on, but we are forever changed. Emotionally scarred, hoping nobody can see the pain still lingering just beneath the surface. And the fear of having to survive loss again. Who will it be? What is going to happen? Would knowing the future make it easier?

I look back and see how I was going through life in a such haze just before, and after, my father died. That was the worst time of my life. My boyfriend, whom I loved so much and had hopes of marrying, dumped me. The roommate I was living with was moving in with her boyfriend and breaking our lease so I was homeless (in a sense) and my father was dying. I lost 10 lbs and looked terrible. How did I hold a job? How did I maintain my sanity? Even now, if I think about my father, about the love I had for him, of how he will never meet my husband or my children, I can weep. Not cry. Weep.

Maybe the hard times we go through make the easier times that much better? Or do the hard times just remind us that life is not meant to be easy? I still can't get a voicemail from my mother without freaking out that something is wrong. "Her voice sounded weird", I'll tell my husband. "Something is wrong." He reassures me, but I think he doesn't know. He hasn't been where I have been. But he has. We all have. Loss and grief tie us all together. Just as birth and love and happiness do. With the good, comes bad and vice versa. So count your blessings when you have them. And really cherish the good times, and the laughter. Moments are fleeting. And that is how we get through the shit. Knowing that "this too shall pass". Wise words spoken by my mother ever since I was little. I didn't realize then how true those words were.