Memories from the Future
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When Someone You Love Leaves
Did you ever realise that we don’t prepare our children to handle romantic transformations? Relationships start and grow. They may continue till death do as part or they may be terminated by one or both members of the partnership.
Being a human being on Earth means that at some point you will miss someone you love. Whether because a person transitioned to the other side or because a relationship ended, grief is inevitable for our species.
When someone we love is no longer here there’s always this sense of being very temporary visitors in the universe as if time had magically ran off. But if we know from the beginning that we and all living things will vanish why is it so hard for us to handle loss?
The Words We Choose
To begin with, we call it “loss”. Loss always presupposes a deficit of something. Of course that referring to it as “transition” doesn’t bring the person back, but somehow it alleviates the pain for it encourages one to see everything as a transformation. One of the words is very definite with a somehow negative connotation while the other one has a certain sense of continuity beyond what we currently perceive as our “self”.
Plus, we are made of water, and if water is affected by words, then so are we. It is obvious then that if we weren’t such speech terrorists, perhaps we could feel (a little bit) better in the context of events (or at least get an extra “help” to handle the process). After all, using strongly negative words is emotional violence.
Even though the pain of separation is very intense, the main suffering comes from resistance. And resistance comes from fear of living the pain and attachment to the impermanent phenomenons of life. These attachments to things and specifically to people we love are perhaps a way to cope with our ultimate fear: the fear of dying.
And of course the main reason we don’t really prepare our kids for this transformation is because — just like the ones who preceded us — we are not prepared ourselves. So we never really know what to say when the “honeymoon” transforms into a different kind of “happily ever after”.
