Losing Someone You Love

Missing A Heart

Watching a morning show I heard the news today that a famous person had lost a son to a drug overdose. How sad I felt for the family. I had also listened to a senator having lost a son to suicide last week, attend to his affairs without missing a beat, yet missing a heart he helped bring into the world. I felt compassion for his family and for him as he accepted what cannot be retrieved. A soul goes out of the world and moves into the ether. It has its own imprint and its own course to run. No one can control life or death. It’s just the sheer absurdity of the ego thinking it has such power. We are blinded by our own lack of preparation.

I think of the people I have lost that have left the physical reality I participate in each day and night. People come and go by different forks on the journey. Each one leaves a different foot print on the road. I lost my father at five to alcoholism. I lost my first boyfriend at seventeen to a drug overdose. He chose heroin over becoming an accountant like his father. Some would say that is a hard argument to win.  My little nephew was murdered at thirteen when he hitchhiked home from the playground and a man decided to rape and stab him seventeen times. My sister never recovered from that loss. How does a parent when a child goes especially with such great suffering? Sometimes loss becomes the force for a new cause or purpose for the living.

I lost a dear friend to suicide. It was just the day after we had a visit together which I had encouraged him to seek medical attention. He chose to exit his body instead. I feared it might happen, but again I had no control over his decision, nor did I understand at the time the extent of his pain and the immediate need for help. That was a profound lesson to recognize a signal for help. Denial or minimizing does not get results in a crisis. Unless someone could have stayed with him all day and night for the rest of his life, he was already planning the exit due to overwhelm and exhaustion. His brain clicked and he went into the end. Again we who are left with survivors guilt and the if only we had known better thoughts, wonder what more we could have done after the fact.

 Life can be exhausting and difficult. We stare in the mirror where we decide if our image is a demon or angel, ugly or beautiful, worthy or worthless. I can only say my days of dark thoughts and possible contemplation of death, have not driven me into the black hole. I have made it this far, enough time to understand that a new day comes if we are fortunate to let it come. The subtle change in the planets can tweak the impulse towards living and turn the tides of fortune into a wave of new possibilities. If you know this,  you can forgive yourself and accept imperfection and quiet the noise long enough to build nirvana. It is a day to day building process and renewal that is a personal responsibility for each one of us.

Losing someone you love is painful. Living in the pain is unbearable and so we have to decide despite the challenge, to move on and carry the love in our hearts and hold the good in memory. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. It just is. Life just is. Death just is as well. It's the love we sustain and the conscious decision for forgiveness that gets us the pass to continue and see where life can take us now. We are never prepared for the final moment but we should be, simply because it is going to happen at some point for everyone.

All the ones we have lost, have had a place in our hearts. We will love them forever and that is their gift to us. Our gift to them is to live our best life.

-Namaste Bubby