No matter how much time you have to prepare (and sometimes you don’t get any), losing someone you love is a shock. It doesn’t seem possible that the earth can still be spinning, and somewhere, someone is at a cash register paying for floss, bread, and apples at a checkout aisle filled with magazine covers shouting about losing ten pounds, and the three best sexual positions you’ve never tried, because everything for us has stopped, and the absurdities of life are clearly in perspective for a moment. Death is the greatest, most permanent loss we face, and because we can’t know for sure what happens next, the grief can be devastating.

The thing is, relationships happen in the space between you and the people you love. They’re a third, living creation that would never have come into existence had you and your loved one not come together. The energy you exchange, the conversations, shared experiences, hugs, talks, laughter, tears, frustrations, silliness that transpires between you and anyone else carries on. I can go back to the living room of the boy I kissed for the first time when I was fourteen as if it were yesterday. With total recall, I can travel to the kitchen in East Hampton where I had one of the most heartbreaking, painful experiences of my life with the guy I dated in college. I can still feel my grandmother, tracing my face with her fingertips as I fell off to sleep, even though the last time I saw her I wasn’t even four years old. Nothing breaks these bonds. You can stay present and work on coming into the now, but it’s as if part of us is still there, still having that moment even as all these other moments are happening. It’s not a mutually exclusive thing. It feels to me like time folds in on itself, and you can be both a mother of two amazing little beings, and a three year old with your grandmother, and a fourteen year old with a racing heart, and an eighteen year old with that same heart breaking, all at once.

That doesn’t quell the desire of wanting to touch the people we love, of wanting to hug them, and hear their voices and their laughter. It doesn’t take away the pain of not being able to smell their smell or bury our face in their neck or pick up the phone to talk. For whatever it’s worth, I don’t believe we have this life and then we become worm-food. You might believe that, and I totally respect your views. No one of us will know for sure until we exhale for the final time, but we are energetic beings, and energy doesn’t die, it changes form. I suppose because I have this sense of time falling in on itself, of everything happening all at once, I don’t feel I’ve really lost any of the people I’ve been close to, even if they aren’t here anymore. I believe we leave a mark on each other. There’s an intertwining of feeling and experience and nothing can touch that.

In most cases, people who are grieving don’t need anything but compassion, patience and a lot of love. Many people are uncomfortable with the weight and force of someone else’s grief. Losing a whole person, the complexity and beauty and spark only they possessed, seems impossible at first, and it makes other people face their own mortality, or acknowledge that the same loss could befall them; for many people that’s a reality they’d like to avoid. As a result, many people who are bereft are left to work it out on their own, at a time when they need support more than ever, and more than anything else.

Life can be brutal sometimes. There are people who are asked to face loss so huge, you have to wonder how they’re going to get through, but the human heart is incredible. When it breaks, it softens and opens if you let it, and more beauty is released. It’s closer to the surface. Certain losses mark you in life, there isn’t any putting them down, but they mark you with empathy and compassion and understanding that is rare and needed. You’re never alone. You aren’t invisible. Your pain matters, but your healing matters, too. When I say healing, I don’t mean that time will make it better, because even time won’t take some things away, it will just make it possible to go on, to laugh again at some point. There are certain things you’re going to have to learn to live with, you’re going to have to integrate the loss and the deep vulnerability in a way that enables you to move forward with an open heart. To trust and to love even though you’re painfully aware that things and people can be ripped from you. Sealing off your heart is not an option, that isn’t living, and while you’re here, you’re meant to live. Anyone who loves you or has ever loved you would want that.

Sending you love and a hug,

Ally Hamilton

P.S. If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here <3