Pain and the Passage of Time...

For those of you who don't know (and how could you, really, without knowing me), one of the closest friends I've ever had committed suicide around 4:30am on January 1, 2000.  Since then, I've chosen, each year, to write a little something in memorial to his passing.  Last year, I heard that there were those who saw my particular ritual of remembrance as clinging too tightly to the past.  As I always do, I gave it some thought and this is what I wrote.

   There are some things that can't be moved past, only lived around. There is a pain in my heart, a few really, that are akin to the pain in my side. It will always be there, feels sometimes as though it always has been, but I've grown used to it and, for the most part, don't think much about it. It is simply something that is. When the weather shifts, or now and then, when something brings them to the forefront of my thoughts, it becomes pointed, but even that passes.


   So it is with the sadness of loss. We don't mourne forever, but that gentle ache stays in the heart, coming to surface now and then. As someone very wise once told me, if it ever truly ceases to hurt, then it probably wasn't really love to begin with, after all.


   For those who have yet to experience the kind of loss that takes a part of you with it, that forever alters who you are, then you probably can't understand and you're the better and the worse for that and I hope you stay that way for as long as possible. For those who have, I don't need to explain that there is a difference between dwelling upon and living with something.


   The sharp pain has long since faded, the need to memorialize. I needed, those first few years, to relive those feelings, let them pass through me, so that I could pass through them. And I have. Now, when I think of him, as when I think of my grandparents, it is with much more fondness than regret, with more joy at the years spent than sadness at those lost. I have never been one to ignore the things I had because of those I didn't. I would rather smile than cry and, for quite some time now, have done so. That, too, is as it should be.