Loss of One Half

Loss of One Half

Loss can be the hardest thing to deal with at times, but it is also a teacher that’s one of the most difficult to ignore. Grief can destroy you or it might give focus that you’ve never known before. You can decide that a relationship was all for nothing if it ended with a death, leaving you alone in the world.

Or you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, maybe there was so much meaning that it scared you, so you just lived , just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn’t allow yourself to consider the “sacredness” of it. But when it’s over and you’re alone, you begin to see, to remember that it wasn’t just dinner and a movie together, not just watching sunsets or sunrises together, not just cleaning up together, or worrying about this bill or that bill. It was all of it, the good with the bad; it was the “why” of life, every single event, and precious moment of it.

The answer to this mystery of existence always seems to come down to the love that you have shared, not always perfect, sometimes it might be quite imperfect. But then loss can wake you up to the deeper beauty of it, the depth of the shared love, to the sanctity of it, you might find that you  can’t get off your knees for a long time. You’re driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by the intense gratitude for what went before the loss.

The ache is there and it will always be there to some degree, but one day, maybe not in the near future, but definitely sometime in the future, the emptiness will be gone. To nurture the emptiness, to take solace in this emptiness, to feed it, is to disrespect the gift of the life just lived and all that came with it.