Just over a month ago I wrote a poem in honor of my Yorkie’s Geburtstag.
The prose ended something like this:
I’ll see you again
When this life is over
There is never an end to love
Last week I lost a person who meant a great deal to me. I loved him perhaps more than anyone I have ever lost. There are so many layers to relationships and it may seem harsh to compare loss to loss. Nevertheless, this is the greatest loss I have yet known. My friend entered my life a decade ago and held a strong presence ever since. I still remember him telling me his college career strategy that afternoon– Fierce. He didn’t like putting things off and preferred to conquer life with haste.
Over the years, my friend saw me at my highest of highs and lowest of lows. He wasn’t afraid to put me in my place because he did so with the utmost care and understanding. Often we laughed together until we couldn’t breathe. He is one person I enjoyed talking Politics with, not because we always agreed. Because we challenged each other. He stood as a confidante with a vast heart. He loved people with soul and tenacity. His imagination was larger than life. My animals adored him, Feline & Yorkie alike. I can still hear his laugh echoing in my head as I feel his blue-eyed smile in my heart. And I miss him insatiably so. I miss the memories over meals we will never again be able to share and the brainstorming of business ventures to come. I miss his quirky humor.
He is thirty years old with a monumental life ahead of him. How could this possibly be real? The Five Stages of Grief step in. I looked them up, not as a way to overcome loss by cleaning up the murky mess into tidy spaces, but in a deep realization of Denial. I am in Denial my friend is gone. The Five Stages of Grief claim Denial helps us to “pace” our grief, and that grace exists in denial as nature’s way of allowing in only as much as we can handle. I saw his burial but I don’t believe he is truly gone. In fact, I believe it less now than before the service. Friends tell me he is always with me, and I am doing my best to hold onto the theory through the immensely heavy grief. Despair lies in grief and I feel it. Desperate, excruciating hurt.
The other Stages are Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. The Stages are not linear, one after the next. Instead, we ebb and flow among them, bombarded by one, then another, and back again. I can attest. Last week I felt Anger rage through me. I experienced myself Bargaining to restore my friend’s life, playing “if-only” along in my mind, making an honest attempt to negotiate my way out of the pain.
As of this moment, I feel Depressed my friend, my family, is no longer in my world and the worlds of many. Unsettled is my soul. I struggle to sleep and wake to loss’ magnitude. I realize Acceptance may merely arrive in the form of experiencing more good moments than bad ones.
I do not wish to be asked questions about my friend’s death. I do not wish to answer inquiries about his services. I do not wish to be asked how I am doing. Last week I did the hardest thing I have ever done in saying goodbye to one of my best friends and greatest relationships of my lifetime. Some moments I live in complete devastation. Other times, I am overcome by the hilarity of fond memories. If I choose to talk, listen. Don’t tell me about how you think you know where I am at, or attempt to relate your parallel stories of having “been there.” Right now I am grieving and I do not wish to be told about your Christmas plans. Last week took the ground out from underneath me. What I considered plan-worthy changed completely.
The only truth I seem to know now: There is never an end to love.