Gone from us : some reflections on losses and relationships

I was reading the lovely chapter on relationships changing form in Marianne Williamson’s book a short while ago after eating lunch and it made we wonder if anyone we truly loved or connected with or any experience we have had is really gone from us. This is a theme that seems to be popping up a lot this week. I was watching an old episode of the US drama This Is Us this week and in it Sly Stallone tells the character Kevin when he tries to blow off the fact that his father died many years ago that time is all very relative. He says something like there are only memories that mean something to us and those that do not. It made me think how when I tried to bring up the issue of the anniversary of my father’s death and its impact on Mum to my brother shortly before she died how he tried to blow it off with a similar comment.

I was watching another show last night in which a parent of a character suffers a stroke and suddenly I just found myself crying and seeing and feeling the impact of my sister’s stroke. I experienced all the feelings I felt when she was struck down in 1980, 6 months after I nearly lost my own life. I have been having similar experiences of being triggered over losses lately and the feelings seem now so much closer to the surface with me, even though those of events and losses occurred so long ago. Feeling the feelings does not detract from the beauty or happiness of the present moment, it no longer needs to keep me away from life and the now, but it does remind me how meaningful and pivotal such experiences were in my own life as I open to risk trusting and giving my heart again.

In her book Marianne Williamson talks of how we can send love to those who leave us due to choice or death, she explains how a relationship does not end merely because it changes form. People may ask me how I could have given my heart to someone I have never physically met but been chatting to for over a year now and may argue the relationship is not ‘real’, but for me it is. When I face the decision to no longer help someone I love and cannot stop crying that is a message to me about what I need to do and about what is important to me.

I talk to my dead family all of the time. I feel them around me sometimes, maybe this is a thing I am making up in my own imagination to give me comfort. Even if so I can draw a degree of peace from knowing that every single relationship I ever had still goes onto to influence me in the current day even when it has long passed away. I remember how after my ex and I separated painful things he said to me lived on over and over inside my head. I understand better now how my actions affected him and accept the fact we were not really able to give each other what we both needed in the way we needed it at that time.

I believe there can be healing that comes from talking over in your imagination issues with loved ones you struggled with in order to come to greater clarity, understanding and peace. For myself I will always be a girl who lost her father at the age of 22 after an argument, I will always be the little 3 year old whose sister left home suddenly to get married and did not come home for years. I will also be the adult self who got to live with these experiences and find a way to manage life, at times struggling. People tell us all the time that we need to live in the now and to a degree that is true, there is great pleasure and power to be had in embracing the present moment, but at the same time I do not think we should underestimate or undervalue the power of the past. However we can also let go in love and learnt to breathe a free breath knowing that the scars or emptiness of the losses that occurred can be filled again maybe not in the same way, but by holding them gently in unconditional self acceptance and wisdom.

In another scene in This Is Us one of the lead characters speaks of how if she did not allow herself to feel her grief it would be like holding her breath for years and years, that really made sense to me of why I so often struggle with breathlessness at critical times of the day. Those feelings we carry over losses still live within us, we do not always know when or how they will be evoked but we can be sure that when the time is right they will and in order to find freedom we need to always bear in mind the advice ‘just keep breathing.’