I
It happens in degrees. Water level receding, oxygen one lungful at a time. The guilt quieter, rounder at the edges: I go days without thinking of you once—later, weeks.
II
It's peeling oranges and tasting the sweet before the sting, it's looking out the window and watching birds fit back into the sky, one by one.
III
This is me releasing your hand, one finger at a time, until all the warmth has run away, because I'm no longer afraid of the cold.
IV
It happens in degrees. The sun rising in shades of gold, me rising with it.
—PORTRAIT OF A HEARTBREAK IN REVERSE
It happens in degrees. Water level receding, oxygen one lungful at a time. The guilt quieter, rounder at the edges: I go days without thinking of you once—later, weeks.
II
It's peeling oranges and tasting the sweet before the sting, it's looking out the window and watching birds fit back into the sky, one by one.
III
This is me releasing your hand, one finger at a time, until all the warmth has run away, because I'm no longer afraid of the cold.
IV
It happens in degrees. The sun rising in shades of gold, me rising with it.
—PORTRAIT OF A HEARTBREAK IN REVERSE
I
saw
something
today
on Facebook
about how Linkin Park's symbol has changed and is now
missing the sixth side in its hexagonal shape because of the
loss of Chester Bennington, as each piece represents an
individual member of the group, and it made silent tears run
down my face as I sat there looking at my phone thinking about
how terrible it all is. It's terrible that people kill
themselves because they think no one would miss them or notice
if they were gone, but the truth is, things are never
the same afterwards. The people whose lives you were in or
whose lives you touched never feel complete again, there's
no replacing you because no one else is a perfect fit to the
mark you left behind. And that holds true for anyone who dies,
whether it's by suicide or any other way. I just lost my
grandmother to cancer and there is an unfillable empty space in
my life now. And the thing that really got to me and made me
emotional today upon seeing that post, was that she
wanted to live. She loved her life, she was a happy,
resilient, energetic, passionate woman who was rarely seen
angry or upset, and when she was, it was for a damn good
reason. She was always on her feet, always traveling somewhere
and looking forward to something, she laughed at almost
everything anyone said and always had something encouraging to
say to someone who needed it. She wanted to
live. She wanted to keep living, and she wanted
to keep giving life to others. But she fell ill and she was
taken from us, from me much sooner than she should have been.
Then there's people whose bodies are perfectly healthy but
their minds are not, and so they take themselves from
their loved ones, they leave when they could have stayed. A
mental health battle can be just as tedious and painful as one
with a bodily disease, it's every bit as deserving of
treatment and support. Don't let anyone tell you that it
isn't. Please, don't take a strong body for
granted. Seek help for your struggling mind so that it can
be healthy, too. Because some people's physical health gets
stolen from them in the blink of an eye, and sometimes
there's nothing anyone can do to recover that.... But
it's never too late to learn to change or manage your
thoughts and coping methods. It's rarely easy, but it's
always possible. Do not give up. Some people don't even
have the luxury of a choice between fighting and letting go. I
wonder, if my grandmother hadn't passed before him, could
she have saved Mr. Bennington by talking to him and listening
to him? I think she might have. She seemed to have that
gift.
It's like Taylor Swift's song Ronan is an amalgamation of
two very significant people in my life whose losses I've
suffered this year: that of my grandmother, from cancer, which was
the cause of death of the little boy the song was written/named
for, and that of a child I bonded closely with for long enough to
become deeply attached and consider my own, in a way. A lot of the
details, the motherly relationship that's depicted and the
image of permanent grief that's painted, strike a deep chord
with me, both because of how my grandmother loved me and how I
loved that child. I got so emotional listening to it last night.
Glad I rediscovered it, even if it's painful to hear.
"I won't
let you disappear
I will keep your
soul alive,
if I can't
have you here
History may have
it's share
of lunatics and
stars..."
I lose people, and amid the tsunamis
of grief and sadness that follow,
I remind myself, when finally chaos tears dissolve
and the aftermath of thoughts is allowed:
“Silly child, you should know better than
to love anyone this much by now,
every time you have loved this hard and this much,
you know it will be wrenched away from you somehow.”
Harry Potter
quotes that mean more to me now than ever
• To have been loved so deeply, even though the person
who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.• I am not worried... I am with you.
• Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.
• To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.
• [After all this time] Always.
• Do not pity the dead... Pity the living, and above all, those who live without love.
• But know this; the ones that love us never really leave us.
• We must try not to sink beneath our anguish, but battle on.
