G is for Grieving

            G is for grieving. It’s a unique human experience, one most of us avoid at all costs. I’ve only experienced one loss in my life of someone near and dear to me, and I’d venture to say it changed me in a way few things will.

            I posted to Music Addicts last week about something I have found myself doing in the last year and a half. When I’m alone in my car with the radio up, sometimes I am singing at the top of my lungs and a strange feeling overcomes me. It’s almost as if, if I put enough volume and emotion into the words, they’ll reach across the veil and find the one I lost. Music is one of the connections I still feel I have to him and that feeling is so overwhelming, so powerful that for a long time, I did not want to mention it to anyone, not even Bear.

            Until you lose someone, you do not know what it’s like. Missing them, wishing they were there, remembering what it was like when they were. I always imagined, but being on the other side of loss is just different. It’s one of those things you think you understand until it really happens to you, and then you truly understand.

            It occurred to me as I was musing while at work, I don’t think I could have appreciated the ending of Twilight’s Dawn as much if I had read it before I lost my Pawpaw. Saetan and Jaenelle returning to the Darkness, dying, was a more powerful, more overwhelming experience to read because I know what it’s like. To smile sadly and say “If he were here, he’d say…”

            We’re all human. Our feelings, our emotions are what help us remember we’re alive and even when they’re painful, it’s a beautiful remembering.