One day, people enter this world and another, they leave it. If they are among the lucky ones, they might have a lifetime…unless life intervenes.
Loss is defined and dealt with so very uniquely by each person who experiences it. You cannot analyze any one individual’s reaction to tragedy, other than your own, that is. Losing someone can make you feel in places and in ways you didn’t know you had within you, an awakening of sorts.
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Although the end of someone’s life is a loss to those who were family, friends, acquaintances; it can sometimes result in a gain. How might that be? To put it bluntly, death makes you suddenly aware of your own mortality. I can not speak for all, but in my personal experience, dealing with loss makes me retreat entirely into my head. I see things from a new perspective, perhaps over-dramatized, but never the less: philosophically. In a way, that is the ultimate parting gift. We beg and plead and succumb to the five stages of grieving, beginning with denial; but ultimately we come to recognize the person for the life they lived, not how they left this world.
In the case of indirect tragedy, where someone in your life loses someone in their's, don’t expect to remain unaffected. Your friend will need support and you’ll want to be there for them at such a difficult time. I can speak for this topic because this summer, I was up close and personal to two losses in the remote town of Whitehall in Upstate, New York. Two losses which in and of themselves accumulated to two more than I had ever had to grieve. While not directly affected by the tragedies, my tight-knit community grieved in support of the families and I along with them, cannot say I walked away without impact.
What I take away from a summer of unexpected and unpredicted, devastating events is just that: they cannot be predicted or prevented. I do not say this because it is some undiscovered secret to which I was an insider but rather to point out that it is natural in times of grief to desire a different outcome. Looking back, I do not panic over all the beach days I spent indoors working, or weeks on end cooped up in my room. We will have decades worth of summer in our lifetimes, we, however, cannot say the same for the people we spent this summer mourning. Just something to think about the next time we find ourselves taking this life for granted.
