Hundreds of thousands of goodbyes are said across the country each day. Some are temporary, silent or even permanent. I’ve had the gift of experiencing all three. No matter how many times we utter the words goodbye, it doesn’t make dealing with the loss any easier. So far, 2015 has been the year of goodbyes for me. It was a goodbye to my mom’s best friend to cancer, to my best high school friends, temporary college ones, to the boy from home I had a crush on and to the life I’ve gotten comfortable living. Those things share one thing in common — I miss them all.
Missing people is a natural, normal part of the grieving process. Whether it’s a loss to death or of toxic friends, the process is equally difficult. Important people leave imprints on our souls in inexplicable ways, and once they leave, we can’t fill the space we’ve created for them. The space sits there with a for sale sign in front of it, waiting for a new person that’s meant to move in. Sometimes the real estate market is good, and other times it’ll take a while for the right house to meet the right owner. Nothing is perfect or timed right, but feeling that deep aching loss is temporary. One of my favorite tumblr quotes says it all, “Just because you miss someone, it doesn’t mean you should go back to them. Sometimes you have to just keep missing them until you wake up one morning and realize that you don’t anymore.” If missing people were simple, grieving wouldn’t be a process. No one is too big or too small to experience it, which is sad and incredibly humbling.
The first day without my best friend in my life, I seriously considered skipping my classes and staying in bed. We had fought a lot over the last year, but I could feel the permanency of this in my bones weighing me down. I knew but couldn’t begin to accept that the words she had spoken to me would probably be the last of our friendship. Seven months later looking back on the situation, I still feel the loss heavy in my heart. I look at pictures of the two of us smiling at track meets, banquets and prom, and I long to have it all back. Permanent, silent goodbyes are the most painful, the ones you can’t forget but have to live with every day. The secret is that they’re our biggest blessing. They teach us the stepping stones of grief, sadness and how to say goodbye. They teach us the value of missing someone without taking them back. Luckily for me, my best friend at school convinced me to come to breakfast and forced me to live my life. The key is not to engulf yourself in the loss. Feeling sad is normal, but living your life in sadness is not. Moving forward, I tried to focus on all the good she had done in my life that I was thankful for. This focus on positivity allows us to be thankful and not bitter in the long run.
Every day the world manages to find a way to make me feel incomplete again. Memories are embedded in places, people and objects, making it impossible to truly escape those we wish to avoid. Whenever I hear a story, meet a person or visit a place, it sometimes reminds me of people in my life who I’ve lost. It cuts you just as painfully as a skinned knee. The trick is you need to let yourself feel sad about the loss for a little while, then move forward. Every day it gets a little easier. You manage to smile through the tears and enjoy the laughter. My most important advice is don’t ignore the gaps in your life; that only rips them open larger.
In February my family took a hard hit. My wonderful mother lost her best friend to lung cancer. It was completely surreal. I had grown up visiting her house with my mom and baby brother. Every birthday and Christmas I received the most thoughtful handmade gifts from her. I walked around campus knowing that death was coming for her, and I couldn’t even explain to people how incredible she was to my mom and my family. It broke my heart knowing that I hadn’t had time to see her in the last year of her life. Death is written off to be a permanent goodbye when in reality it isn’t. It’s temporary because no matter where you go in your life, I truly believe that your loved ones watch over you and cheer you on from wherever it is that they go. Death is peace to living souls, which must sound ridiculous, but death is a life without the suffering and imperfections of human life.
No matter how old I am or how far I’ve come in life, I expect to lose people that no longer serve a purpose in my life. I expect that sometimes, it’s a person’s time to leave this world for reasons we may never understand. Accepting loss has challenged and strengthened me in ways that I never expect. One of my good friends once reminded me how everyone deserves the world. The bad news is that loss will always be present in our lives no matter how far we travel or how desperately we attempt to forget. The good news is that everything in life is temporary and can be overcome. Remember the good, and forgive the bad, and go out and find the world that you deserve.
