Version française ici – Losing a loved one is a bitter and difficult experience, both mentally and emotionally. As a result, coping with a loss and the duration of grief varies from person to person, ranging from a few days to months, years or even an age of endless mourning.
Losing someone is hard, but trying to make sense of that loss and validate one’s feelings is even harder. Grief has a different form and meaning for each of us. Some of us grieve using means such as tears, words and memories, while others do so with music or images. So, there’s no single way of experiencing and dealing with loss. Especially the loss of a loved one. Regardless of how an individual deals with loss, it is a personal choice.
Loss also means different things to different people. As a child, I watched my father lose his mother, then his spiritual and religious mentors, one after the other. Yet he never shed a tear. When his mother, my grandmother, died I was six and didn’t realize what it meant. As a teenager, I saw him bury his brother and closest cousins. The same thing happened when I was in my twenties. My age had a profound influence on the way I perceived these losses. Yet it wasn’t until I lost my cousin to a pregnancy complication and my close friend, who happened to be my great-uncle, that I began to feel the pain of losing a loved one. Their young age, both in their thirties, and the circumstances in which they left us weighed heavily on my heart. However, on closer inspection and hindsight, I consider this a mild pain, due to my recent losses in April and August of this year.
Losing someone is hard, even harder is to try to make sense of the loss and validating one’s feeling
In fact, the loss of my grandfather, my mother’s father, made my heart bleed. Even though we knew he was sick and old, losing him caused my whole family enormous pain. For me, it wasn’t losing his body, never seeing him again or being able to touch him and express my love for him that made me suffer, it was everything he represented and meant to me that tested me and made me suffer. I remember his wisdom, his unconditional love and the unwavering support he gave me, my education and my work in a very conservative family. When I lost him, I kept saying to friends who had lost loved ones and for whom I felt empathy, sympathy and compassion: “I began to imagine how you must have felt losing your wife, mother, father or child”. I thought and expressed these words as my lost made me realise the depth of pain, wound, and sorrow someone feels when they lose someone they care about.
I’d never felt the emptiness, the sense that something had been ripped away from me, violently ripped away, until I lost my grandfather. So, I cried when I should have smiled, I looked without seeing. In an attempt to digest and make sense of this loss, I continued to talk about him at every opportunity and every day, as if this would bring me closer to him, as if this would help me not to forget his face as it faded from my memory. I played and sang songs that expressed unconditional love, that described the relationship we had and the love I had for him, but they made me cry.
Pain and grief are not the only expression of loss; they are part of a range of feelings that express it
Yet the weight and depth of the grief and pain of losing her seemed almost trivial when I lost my cousin. The one who paved the way for me, the one who was the first woman in my life to graduate from high school and university. Her sudden disappearance made no sense to me and I tried to understand why she was gone so soon and why a kind-hearted, faithful, pious and inspiring young woman would suddenly disappear and never open her eyes again, never smile, never laugh, never speak to me again. I tried to make sense her disappearance, to wonder where she would be and how she would interact with the people around her. I began to wonder how she would feel, how she would react if she knew she would leave too soon.
I couldn’t stop wondering about the meaning of life, asking myself existential questions. In the middle of the night, when I woke up, the first thing that came to my mind was her, and I wondered about the whys and wherefores of her absence. Even today, I can’t bear to say her name and ‘dead’ in the same sentence. Her departure made me realise that our relationship could have been better, that I should have visited her more often, that I should have called her more often, that I should have loved her more. But none of that would have been enough to ease the pain and loss I felt. While I was feeling like that, I saw people closer to her smiling and laughing, and I realised that grief didn’t mean the same thing to me as it did to them. I realised that the fact that they were laughing didn’t mean that they weren’t suffering or that they didn’t miss her, but that we’re all different, and even more so when it comes to death and bereavement. If there’s one thing bereavement has taught me, it’s never to take for granted a single second spent with a loved one, and that love doesn’t cost us much and that we should reach out to hug more, reach out and spend more precious time with our loved ones and those we love. In the meantime, praying for all the loved ones who have left us too soon and keeping their memory alive is to pay them tribute and keep their legacy.