‘You are Loved’ seems just right…

“I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process.”

~C.S. Lewis (A Grief Observed)

Even when you have mourned the death of a loved one before the whole processes is very confusing for you.    Each and every individual person who dies leaves a unfillable hole in your life… their being and mass once took that space up and it will never really be filled again in this life.   Mourning will appear familiar and completely new with each unique person you say farewell too.  It  can be hard to know what to say to someone who is dealing with death front and center, but perhaps it helps to know it is very foggy for them too.  

This weight changes shape and form sometimes multiple times a day.  It occupies much of ones mind and heart and leads to clumsy behaviour, but can also sharpened a sense of everyone’s worth around you. 

This heart ache brings tears in plenty and your heart will want to burst; this kind of crying will lead to an actual hang over experience the  morning after.  It can also mean laughter is genuine and felt to the absolute core of a person … much more felt then possible at other times. 

This complex experience can lock one down, speechless and unable to express the magnitude, and other times it can mean one is unable to stop the flow of explanation, exasperation, emotion.

This mountain of emotion leaves one  completely raw soon followed with a complete numb.  Both emotional states are regrettable.  Both emotional states are unavoidable.

This vulnerable position brings fear of loneliness and things unsaid right along with fear of interaction with others and not knowing what to say.

“For in grief nothing “stays put.” One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?

But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?

How often — will it be for always? — how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, “I never realized my loss till this moment”? The same leg is cut off time after time.”

~C.S. Lewis (A Grief Observed)

This part of life is both as regular as birth and as potentially traumatizing.  Like birth, death can hold a seed of hope, of faith and of love.

What can really be said???!!!  From where I have been sitting, in the seat of a daughter who has just lost her Dad, “I love you”, “You are loved”, and “I care, but don’t know what to say” seem to work just fine.

Always

Lady Mac an Rothaich