The Ineludible Affliction
Death I know is a pretty dark topic to begin a blog with, but then does it not imply the beginning of something too? A Life that other’s begin to live bearing the loss of that loved one in their heart, a life where you know that the person you loved does not exist anymore, and sometimes a life where everything changes with the loss of that one person.
This entry below, is what I wrote for my mom to say at the prayer meeting kept for my grandfather. Since m not much of a writer I stole the beginning and the end of it, i.e. quotes from Anne Lamott and Jeanette Winterson respectively.
I know it’s good because I didn’t see my mom cry one bit when she got the news or throughout the cremation, but she couldn’t get through the whole thing without crying. I don’t know, it may be because it was a loss so great that it took time for her to wrap her head around it but I’d like to think it was my writing that made her cry.
So here goes… From a daughter to her father..
“You will lose someone you think you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your loved one. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp”
I am sad that I lost the man who I looked up to, the man who raised us to be the fine people we’ve become, who taught us what hard work meant, who fed me with his own hands even when he didn’t need to only to show how much he loved and cared for us, I am sad coz I lost my father. But, I am happy. Happy that he lived a long happy life, that I knew such a fine soul to be my father, as the man of the family, and that he knew; his family was always beside him.
Old age takes its toll on everyone but he being the man he is, fought it and I can say so because even when he was hospitalised, when he couldn’t talk he assured my daughter that he was perfectly fine.
She went inside the ICU with a straight face and came out happy knowing that her Daddy (yes.. that’s what the kids in the family call him!) was a brave man.
People say “you’ll get over it..” I believe you don’t just get over a loss like that. To lose someone you love is to alter your life forever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?”
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