You may have noticed; I haven’t been writing. I had to exchange my usual Mon-Wed-Fri writing routine for something less pleasant; last Tuesday (July 22), our family was dealt a huge blow by the unexpected death of one of our finest members. Most of the words I have been trying to write since then seem meaningless.
There is an emptiness, a feeling of living without the ability to hear or see, that follows an event like this. It is quiet inside my head, around my house, and across my cast of family and friends. The writer in me has also been quiet.
How do you write about defining someday - dreaming, planning, and experiencing life goals - when you suddenly realize that someday not only involves living, but inevitably, dying? It strikes me as strange, now, how little we plan for death, when two realities of life never change - people die every day, and we are all going to die someday.
If anything has come from this, it has been these lessons:
- Someone you know and love may die unexpectedly (this is so easy to forget)
- You are never too young to have a Last Will (why do we procrastinate about this?)
- Grieving is exhausting but vital (we often pretend to be strong and rob ourselves of this process)
Have I missed something? Is there a bittersweet part to experiencing loss and grief?
**********
I promise to return to a normal Mon-Wed-Fri schedule soon. Thanks for your patience.
If you liked this post, subscribe to my RSS Feed!
Similar Posts:
3 responses so far ↓
1 Shannon // Aug 1, 2008 at 1:53 pm
The sweet part is the memory part. Memories of your love onedon’t go away. And in the reflective time immediately following a death family and friends are particularly immersed in those memories.
I have often found that the family closeness following a death to be particularly bittersweet in that the reason you are together is sad, but (at least in most of my experiences) you are sticking together, caring for each other in your loss, sharing happy memories, and even making some new memories. After some of the deaths of some very special people in my life I have been especially thankful for these times of closeness with my remaining family members, realizing that our lives go on, despite our loss.
2 Wild Card Inside | defining someday // Aug 11, 2008 at 1:36 pm
[...] subscribe ← It’s Quiet Around Here [...]
3 Carnival of Positive Thinking // Aug 24, 2008 at 4:41 am
[...] presents It’s Quiet Around Here posted at Defining Someday, saying, “On grief, and the quietness that comes with [...]
Leave a Comment