My friends are losing loved ones and relationships all around me. I feel so inadequate to respond. I’ve lost too many myself and every story hits my gut deeply.

I know how the ground falls away from your feet and life floats for far too long. I know how sleep refuses to take away the pain for more than a few minutes at a time. I know that even driving a familiar path can become confused. When I went through my divorce, I remember turning the wrong way down a one-way street on the way home from work, the same way home I took for years.

I know that feelings come and go like waves… for years and years, despite what society says. I know that someone will try to help by saying “get over it” or “it’s been long enough, make a new life now” when that is just not reality for the mourner.

I know that losing a pet or becoming divorced are society-silenced losses which can hit us as deeply as those which require memorial services. Painfully, in those cases there is no public way to share the deep loss.

And when it’s time to call or write, to say I understand… well, all the words leave me. There is no good way to comfort the inconsolable.

I wrote a poem/letter to my father on the 23rd anniversary of his death. Society thought I should be done with that loss long before. I still have waves of feeling when I hear a particular song on the radio, the one which I sung for my brother’s first wedding to his now deceased first wife, Kelly.

If you need someone to understand, rest assured. At least I do.

Images: My dad in high school, me in 4th grade. Same eyes and ears. (He died when I was 14.) Brian’s dear friend who played banjo until he was 99, his last year with us. My cat, Muffett… the only pet I’ve ever had. I had him 17 years and even my friends cried when he died.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 24th, 2013 at 1:04 pmand is filed under Relationships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.