The Gap

I cannot say I have a great deal of experience with the loss of loved ones but each loss has been felt acutely. In the case of my father, it was a sense of regret that he was alone at the time of death. I had visited him a few weeks before his death but needed finally to return to my young family. And there was a mix up with contact details for my mother so they couldn't reach her. 

I felt sad about his dying, and when I returned again to Australia for the funeral I remember the weight of the feeling just as I was about to enter the Church; the Church where he had been married and I had been married. I recall it as a sinking feeling; like I was being pulled down and back.

Thinking about it now I felt he had a good life; the life he wanted. It wasn't a privileged life and he had his sorrows like us all, but he had a marriage that fulfilled him, largely, and work and interests that engaged him. Although he died relatively young, almost 77, it had been a life such that when he passed, there was a relative lightness about it; an end to the cancerous state.

I have lost others I was close to. The loss of David who I met through his blog 'Room at the Top' is still felt. We were chums and could shoot the breeze about almost anything. He had an old world charm about him, a man that shined his shoes, you know, and I appreciated all that. 

 

He was a darn good friend, and someone who offered sound advice lightly; respectfully and sometimes quite firmly. I suppose I just look back on all those conversations with gratitude and affection. Again, it wasn't a privileged or perfect life, but he had so much sense and he had made peace with the world and his world. The sense of his passing was also a degree of lightness.

In the case of Deity there is a sense of heaviness about the passing; that it should never have been this way. I am struck with this sense of weight about it at the same time as a sense of release; for him and for me. For whatever reasons, this world was too weighty for him and as I think about it now perhaps no one that finds the days so heavy should be asked to endure beyond a certain point.

To be clear, he had a sense of silliness that was light and breezy, but the darkness was never terribly far away. He just couldn't get out of its clutches. It wasn't like Churchill's 'black dog' at all; not depression. It was the difficulty that ensued when carrying the wrongs of the world; when searching for relief not easily found.

It has a sense for me of how I felt when my father in law died. There had been so much passion; so much angst, drama, anger, intensity; conflict; resolve, commitment, that on passing, the world did seem lighter for the passing; the warrior at rest; the battle over.

When we lose someone who has made up our reality, it's a new reality for us. Everything looks a little different. There's a gap and we have to decide what to do with that gap.  It's an opportunity to look out at the world with fresh eyes. We need quiet time to process the passing at the same time as we need to engage with this new life of ours.

It's a strange phenomena for me right now. As much as I know with absolutely certainty that Deity is gone and  will not be returning in that form again, I do feel him around me and I sort of want him to be proud should it be that particular cloud above my head from which he is peeking down.

Do you ever catch yourself walking down a street and looking out with a sudden understanding that what you see isn't actually 'real? I am not at all sure that here we are on Earth and there are the dead, somewhere else. Souls linger about, at least some of them; maybe those we want to linger about.

Maybe that lingering we sense might also be called the love that remains in the heart. As a Buddhist might say, rupture becomes rapture.