Take a Moment for Someone Loved and Lost

First published on October 9, 2019

It was almost exactly a year ago, as I read Fred Kofman's book, The Meaning Revolution, that I first really considered the effect of death on us, on our lives. It is an almost unique experience as we consider how best to live. 

Since then I have experienced deaths close to me three times, each with its own tragedy, its own sadness, its own relief, its own pain. 

The absence in the present.

The regret and bittersweet memories of the past. 

The absence of possibility in the future.

It's not that I had never experienced the gulf of death before; it's just, I think, that I hadn't thought about it like this, I hadn't sat with it in a practice like this, writing from that place, from the yawning gulf of 'over'. Perhaps it's that I'm older now, and mortality is somehow more real. Perhaps it's simply three events coming within those few months.

David Gemmell wrote about death beautifully, drawing - I imagine - on the experience of losing his wife. The sense of forgetting death and then remembering and then losing someone all over again. The sense of guilt. Dreams of the dead alive, and then the moment of waking to cold reality. The loss of a loved one with shared memories, whose loss then robs those memories of their joy.

These are the things we must weather in our lives, through every moment of loss and tragedy. 

I don't like things to end. I'm always the last on the corner saying goodbye, the last person in the pub at the end of a night out, the last person replying in a WhatsApp conversation. 

I don't want to let go of people, either. When my old coach Rich asked me what my biggest struggles were, I answered that loss hits me hard. 

I suspect those things are related. 

What wonderful creatures we are, we humans. So textured, so alive, even in our struggles. What joy and meaning we are capable of creating, so that our absence provokes the strongest emotions in those we leave behind. 

How frustrating the modern world, able to save so many people, but not able to save everyone, like the hero set on his path by a tragedy he will never be able to stop. No matter how many other families are safe because of his work, the twisting sadness is that his family will never be saved.

And yet, would life be as sweet without death? Isn't, as Gemmell also writes, the natural flower more beautiful than any artificial one, specifically because its beauty fades? Would you, if given the choice, live forever? 

I don't want to let go of those who die. I worry that I won't be able to hold the feeling of loss that they deserve, that it will fade. And of course it will. I worry that tears won't always come to my eyes. And of course we won't.

But we owe those who have lived here before us something; some moment, at least, of remembrance.

Take that moment of remembrance now, for someone loved and lost. Gone, forever, into the great song.