How I consume and process other people’s stories has changed, since 2019 happened. Things impact me differently than they used to before. It’s not that sad and/or tragic stories didn’t make me feel something before, but now I hear or read those stories and my brain goes to a different place.
I read about a mother who loses her child in some senseless event, and think about what it would be like to arrive home to her child’s things around the house for the first time after the child’s death. I read about a family who goes to the hospital to give birth and arrives home without a living child, and I wonder if their nursery had been put together, and think about how devastating that decision on what to do with it would be. I see odd cancer-related commercials on TV that try to be serious, but not too serious, and I think about all the things those commercials don’t show you that happen over the course of treatment, all the decisions you have to make that it doesn’t acknowledge. I hear about unexpected deaths of adults, and hope that someone in that person’s life has information on and access to the important accounts, websites, etc. needed to deal with their estate. I wonder if the grieving family members I read about will end up with a pile of sympathy cards that they don’t know what to do with when the visitors are gone, the services are over, the flowers have withered, and the casseroles have all been consumed.
These people are all in the middle of or getting ready to face the mind-numbing multitude of tiny day-to-day moments and tasks and reminders that will each jab something sharp into their hearts. On top of that, they will have to figure out a way to reorient themselves in a new reality that no longer looks the way that their reality is supposed to look. Oh, and they will also have to figure out how to navigate the minefield of personal interactions as a grieving person all while running on empty for the foreseeable future.
How is this possible? How does anyone survive this?
I read about someone’s loss and my heart swells with all these thoughts and questions. As tears well up, my breath catches and then I remember – I am one of those who are just trying to survive. It’s not that I ever really forget, but if I focus too often on the entirety of what we went through, on what all I have lost, it is overwhelming and I don’t know how I’m still here.
I read others’ stories of loss and although everyone’s stories are different, I can see bits of myself in each one, in their grief. This isn’t a connection I asked for, nor is it one I would wish on anyone, but everyone will experience profound, reality-altering loss at some point in their life, and once that happens nothing is ever the same again – no matter how much one wishes it, or how much one might try and pretend that it can be.