So after this weekend I’m feeling just a tad bit emotional and a hell of a lot grateful for the people within my life. Working my way backwards its easy to see why when a close friend drops the bomb that their aunt died the day school broke out. When he says he’s feeling numb and not phased by this I should naturally be astonished and admonish him for being so cold-hearted. But I can’t because I seem to be the single one of my friends that has never lost somebody I am close to. I feel dang lucky for it but that doesn’t mean that I can’t imagine what its like to lose somebody. I’ve watched my father’s father pass on from beside my living room but I was too young to remember him and in another country so I didn’t see the funeral. I have never worn a black dress and felt the pain of those who grieve for their loved ones, not once. But I have heard stories, the truths of losing someone from my mother, who in my opinion in a fountain of information and knowledge and the most beautiful soul I have ever seen.
My mother lost her own when she was fifteen years old. It was the medical monster that so many battle and that so many do not beat, Cancer, of the cervix to be specific about it. She was ill for a long time, my mother and her siblings were forced to live elsewhere during term time so that they could get an education and my grandmother could get rest. They couldn’t afford the treatments, a sad but honest fact about life in Zimbabwe. My mother sat with me and described how she felt when she died. She heard the news but it was just words to her, she accepted that she wouldn’t see her mom again, she knew it but she didn’t truly feel the loss. Perhaps it was because she had cared for her, or she had seen her mothers suffering or maybe it was just denial. I think it was shock, because no matter how much you prepare for it and try to accept it before hand it is still going to shock you. She told me that she never really understood why people where giving her condolences and pitying glances, she didn’t understand why they kept telling her to cry and that it would be okay. My mother thought she was going go get home from school at the end of term and she’d see her mom again. That never happened. She got home from term and her mothers partner gave them their mothers things and told them to leave. That was when she realised she wasn’t coming back, when she realised that she her mother was gone from his world. She cried, she missed her time to grieve because she couldn’t feel it, it had felt like she was walking through a dream.
My father was the same. When he lost his dad, he cried so much on the first day he heard the news and the second and third and then he went numb, and he acted like everything was fine. So did my uncle, his younger brother, they carried on and carried on with my cousin his birthday party and afterwards they realised that they had lost their father and they cried. They grieved. I don’t know much about death but maybe that’s just the way it is for everyone. When my friend told me about his aunt I didn’t know what to say. He adored his aunt, she was the one he went to for everything, they had the kind of bond that you only hear about in novels and watch in indie films but it was there. Now she’s gone. His loss seems to have triggered something within me, my friend and I were close a long time ago, but broken hearts and trust left me distancing myself from him, I’m still distant but it means something that when he felt numb it was me he spoke to, that even in this he somehow thinks i will say the right thing. Maybe for him my story about my moms own experiences with loss were the right thing, maybe he just wanted to hear that its okay to not feel anything right now that its okay to be numb. Or maybe it way the comfort of having somebody not push him to remember his aunt and not tell him to tell me all the memories he has of her or to tell him that its going to be okay. Maybe its just due to the fact that I couldn’t lie to him and promise that it’s going to be okay when I don’t know if it will be? I told him that HE would be okay, that I was sorry and that I’m here for him despite everything.
I don’t know if any of that was the right thing to say, how could I, I’ve never lost anyone. But whether or not they loved you back or you got a chance to say goodbye before their death, you loved them and that love for them will carry you through this and if you feel stuck, like you can’t let go and leave it behind you that okay too because you don’t have to. There’s a difference between moving on and letting go, when you move on that person is till in you heart and they always will be, you just have to move forward they are still with you even if you continue with life. As for letting go, it doesn’t mean you’re forgetting them, they’re still there they will always be a part of who you are what it means is that you can make peace with hem being gone and not coming back and that you can smile as you cry because you know that they left this world being loved whether or not they knew it, you can find peace int he fact that you loved them as much as you could, and if you feel like you could have done more, then that’s okay too because no human being is perfect.
We live and die in a world made up of imperfect people who see perfection in the ones that love, so even if the person who has passed were not in love with you somebody out there is and somebody out there will love you again. I don’t know much about losing somebody but I think that if it were to happen to me, all I’d want to hear, what id want to know is that there is somebody out there in the world that cares no matter who they are, because if one person other than myself care and can tell me no matter how so I know that I can be okay because it gives me a reason to carry on. So this is me telling the world I care and that I love you, that I love them whether I know them or not, and I always will just the same as you.
Michelle
xxx
The Inevitable Oblivion 