Loss changes everything. It alters the way you view the world and removes your rose-colored glasses.
The colors around you aren’t so bright anymore.
You’re stuck in a monotone existence, where sadness splatters your life.
Loss changes you as a person. It brings another element to how you live your life. These changes are often physical, mental and emotional.
It’s like turning a page and starting a whole new story on the other side, yet it’s still apart of the same book.
There’s a silent shift in the air. You’re the elephant in the room, bringing a heaviness everyone feels but won’t acknowledge.
You become the statistic. The ones you once read about and never believed could be you.
Loss awakens you to reality in the cruelest way.
Loss is the great divide. Between you, and them, the lucky ones.
You’re in limbo constantly. Do you continue to listen, stay in the room while talk turns to healthy births, pregnancies, and plans for the future?
Do you walk away and take a deep breath while you calm your pounding heart in your chest.
You know you’re the thorn in their side, you see the awkward glances they give you.
Loss is a reminder. Of the fragility of life.
We’re all hanging by an unseen thread which dangles and flits in the winds of life. It’s a reminder of what is essential in life.
You love more deeply, almost recklessly. You appreciate the little things so much more.
Loss nudges you forward when you feel like hanging back.
It urges you to take risks because tomorrow is not promised. It demands that you introspect.
It begs that you filter out the unnecessary and unimportant.
Loss is the great judge of character. You know who your friends are and who aren’t.
You know who you can count on.
You know that it isn’t about the inability of others to handle your sadness, but rather their failure to try.
You realize that grieving people need love and support.
Loss is a teacher. It makes you more in tune with the workings of the human mind, and you start to understand how difficult dealing with grief indeed is.
Loss teaches you compassion and understanding. The grieving should not be left in isolation.
You finally understand that you can never live oblivious to the suffering around you.
There is no longer a hierarchy of whose loss is greater or a customary “at least.”
Loss is simply devastation, and you understand that first hand.
There is no “at least” that will ever make sense.
Loss is the lesson you never needed or wanted. It forces itself on you, shouting for your attention.
It is the signs you missed and the things you have to learn to live without. It’s adjusting and adopting a new, almost unnatural way of living.
It knows what not to say.
Loss is a whole new alphabet, anguish, brokenness, crushing, devastation… it consumes you, it feels like it will bury you alive and you still stand somehow, despite that or maybe because of it.
Your vocabulary changes too, you’re not just sorry for another’s loss, you empathize with it, you feel it in your soul.
And you understand how fortunate you used to be when you didn’t know it firsthand.
Loss is an abyss — a giant hole of nothingness in the soul. You’re continually trying to find the bottom, but it is like free-falling for eternity.
Losing a loved one leaves a gaping hole like nothing else. No matter how hard you try, you can’t seem to fill it.
You try everything, but it’s always there an incessant nothing.
Loss humbles you. It brings you down to earth in a sense.
It’s getting slapped in the face with a realization that it did happen to you and that you are not immune to it.
That it’ll find you anywhere.
Loss does not just describe death; it is the loss of hope, faith, and optimism.
It is losing your trust that there is goodness in the world, even if it is for a little while. It takes time and insurmountable internal battles to regain it.
But you do, if you allow it because you understand that one cannot live without hope.
Living after loss hurts. It is a heavy burden you bear.
You question why you survived at all because everything aches inside.
The tears fall in the cloak of the night when you’re huddled in a fetal position hiding from the world.
Living is healing. You’re here to tell a tale, no matter how brief the life of your child was, you have something to share.
You are the voice of the unborn and short-lived. You hold all those precious memories, and you are the narrator of their story.
A particular moment you had, it’s all more significant now. Loss makes you live more loudly and with great passion because each day is a day closer to the end.
Living is connecting with people on a soul level.
It’s sharing your sadness and having someone to listen.
It is meeting people who have lost too and being able to be their shoulder to cry on and their hand to hold.
It is about being able to view the world in all its shades, of dark and light.
When Joy And Pain Are Forever Bound
Living understands that the world keeps spinning, it is finding joy again, no matter how hard that may be.
It can smile and laugh at silliness again.
Living through loss is a journey, and along the way, you have to stop and look back at how far you’ve come.
It was not a planned journey, and the road is treacherous and uncertain. It is not as simple as “get over it” or “you need to move on.”
It is complex, and there are days when you feel like you’re going to cave.
It’s those days that you should remind yourself how worthy your sadness is.
It has a place in the world.
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Photo Credit: Ihor Malytskyi / Unsplash
Jo-Anne Joseph is a wife, mother to two beautiful children, one of whom lives in her heart. She is a career woman, author and freelance writer from South Africa. She blogs at www.mylittlelightzia.wordpress.com and writes for www.glowinthewoods.com.
Caryl Ritenour says
Very accurately and beautifully written. My “baby” was my only child, 23 years old. Eric died in an auto accident and was the light in our family’s lives. We will never get over it….and we feel exactly what you have written. May God help us all suffering losses thru this life and help us prepare for our loved ones in heaven..they will be there waiting for us! CER
Claudia Pintande says
I have friends who have lost their children and have a front foe sit to their pain, no matter how times goes by. This beautifully written piece should be read by ALL. It gives an insight that might help others to understand, having said that , for those who have not gone thru the loss of a child we will never fully understand. God Bless you all and may he hold you in the palm of his hands.