Musings on Death

It is seismic in effect.  Death reshapes the world in which we live; the loss of someone alters irrevocably the landscape we navigate.

No matter how little we knew the person, their loss is a shaking of our world, a removal from the interactions we have day to day.  The nearer we were to them, the closer we held them in our hearts, the larger the earthquake and more visceral the twisting of our environment.

Even the most distant of deaths, the passing of famous people who we have never met but whose work has touched us to our core, or of brief acquaintances who we passed as ships in the night, will affect our lives, our landscape, our emotional environment.

A person who was kind to us in a moment, whose passing we learn of in passing, may shake us and we do not know why.  It is their action we mourn, the loss of a person whose influence was positive, who taught us a way of being we wish to emulate.

The dying of the light that had however briefly illuminated our path will remap our personal sphere.

It is for that we mourn.  For the effect the lack of their presence in the world has on us and on those we love who mourn with us although they may not know it; the lack of those departed that makes the world a dimmer place.

We feel guilt with the grief; guilt that we mourn and we feel we have no right to.  We did not know them, we were not loved by them and our grief is inappropriate, intrusive, unnecessary.

But we do have a right to.  We have a right to feel, to grieve, to lament their loss.

Grief is always personal. It may surprise us when it comes, it may be a reflection of other grief unspent, it may be a bemoaning of specific loss, but whatever it is, it is okay.  It is not inappropriate, it is not wrong.

It is merely ours, and it is borne of love, and love, unconditional and unrequited as it may be, is never wrong.

I love, and I will grieve, and I will hurt, and I will mourn and remember.  I will light a candle in my heart and raise a glass at the wake, which may be held only by me.

And I will accept myself in that grief as humane.  I will allow that grief is love.

It is my gift, to myself, to permit my feelings their pathway.

And I will grow from it.

I will love.

I will grieve.

And I will love again.

Advertisement