One of things that I’ve been doing over the last two years is living with loss.
It’s amazing how many cliches become a feature of life as it goes on with you barely holding on.
When I lost someone the first time out two years ago, I took some time to recover, with that loss, I lost a lot of memories, gained more pain than I knew what to do with, and learned what mattered to me the most.
Atleast that’s what I thought, until 2 months later when another loss left someone very important to me without anything to hold on to, and me unable to hold on to them. Every decision to be made in this time was detrimental in nature. I made them all.
I went through the cycle again, pulled myself together, reflected on the past, and tried to trudge on.
Until two months later when another loss cut the people most important to me in their deepest veins.
Pull yourself together, reflect on the past, and try to move forward.
4 months later. I lost my dad.
He would’ve turned 55 today, which is one of the reasons I decided to get this out today.
I initially thought I’d write about what I learned from living with loss.
I guess you learn things about yourself, people around you, your priorities, their priorities, what it means to be there for someone, to have someone be there for you, so many more things.
But, all of these are anecdotal, as much as people try with cliches and platitudes, they cannot be genericised, I don’t think so anyway.
Remember that cycle I talked about earlier, the one about pulling yourself together…, well, I realised over the past few months I got it all wrong.
I didn’t pull myself together. I didn’t reflect on the past. I didn’t trudge on.
All you have is pain. It’s not the type of pain that you experience, it isn’t the type that leaves you exhausted. The truth is its a kind of pain that never leaves you.
It’s the kind of pain that distorts logic of all forms. I’ve read descriptions of why some forms of torture work and its a bit like that.
I’ve been aware of the Kubler-Ross model for a while, but, I didn’t see it play out for me.
The cycle I went through is Pain, Numbness from Pain, Destruction due to the Numbness, being able to Feel again.
The biggest problem with this form of pain is that you don’t have anyone to blame, no one is putting you through it. You’re not fighting, you’re just losing.
At this point I’m just rambling. On some level I don’t know what to write about. I know the title says living with loss, maybe it should living with pain, I don’t know.
Writing in itself is a little therapeutic, that’s partly why I’m writing about this.
It doesn’t ease anything, it just feels like I did something and I can pretend it helped.
I miss you terribly pa. I wish you were here.
Happy birthday.
Sainath