On Loss & Life: The death of my Father & how loss changed my life’s Paradigm.

On loss and life.

I lost my dearest, so very dearest father in my teens, at a very young age. I’ve lived with a single mum for 11 years now. Life has been very kind. Mind you not easy but kind. It’s strange when I say this. Therefore I’ve penned down an ode to my not so easy journey. Dealing with unfathomable loss and tremendous pain and coming out not intact but victorious.

Life keeps moving even when you’re stuck in time.
People keep moving.
Things keep happening.
Your pain keeps amplifying and multiplying.
The grief hits you in many multidimensional phases.
The pain resides in the most remotest of your spaces. The spaces of your heart. The spaces of your mind. The spaces of your being.
You feel stuck and trapped and lost and gone.
You develop mental health issues. Chronic depression. Debilitating anxiety. PTSD.
Whether they’ve died right in front of you or not. PTSD. Most likely.
It all comes from a place of profound loss.
You do everything in your power to escape that resonating void. How does empty space resonate?
And with what?
Is there sound in space? No.
You wonder about science, religion, god, soul, parallel universes, Fermi’s paradox, life after death.
And at some point, deep, so deep in your despair, in other words, depression, you think about death, you contemplate suicide BUT you don’t act on it.
You suffer.
You suffer endlessly.
While people go about their businesses.
You suffer and scream, then repeat and then some more BUT you don’t want to be silenced even as you’re left incapable of experiencing emotions and putting them into expression.
Finally, you seek help.
You haven’t given up so far.
You don’t give up.
You didn’t give up.
So you seek help.
You get treatment.
All the trauma, all the unresolved issues, all the struggles, all of it, comes to the surface, it comes to the surface with such a force that you’re on the ground.
You know other people have it worse, that they go through even worse, you see them, read about them, even talk to them.
But you’re on the ground.
You get back up.
Back up.
Once more.
A hundredth time.
You get up.
And you get treatment.
You love yourself and you get treatment.
You don’t lose faith in yourself.
Despite the crippling pain. Despite the physical symptoms. The mental torture. The suffocation.
You don’t lose hope.
You don’t lose hope even as hope kept leaving you from time to time.
You hold on to yourself.
Whatever little is left of you.
And you tell yourself that there’s still a lot left.
And you love yourself.
You love others.
You keep going.
You decide to live.
So you keep going.
And life starts getting better.
Very slowly but it starts to come back to you.
And you welcome it with tears rolling down your cheeks like an ocean, a lifetime of pain and suffering when you’re still in your late 20s.
You welcome it with arms wide open, eyes closed, smiling up at the serenity of it all. And you remember all through this you not only lived but thrived.
You lived and loved and laughed and slept in peace many nights in spite of the incomprehensible pain.
And you remember how kind life has been.
You remember it all now.
Not just the pain. Not just the grief. Not just the loss.
But the love you accumulated, the relationships you made, the love you gave and equally received.
The achievements, the goals, the meaning you gave to life and the opportunity life gave you to live that meaning, to manifest it, to breathe it.
And you did.
For the most part.
Even as you were struggling to find your way, writhing in pain, you made your gains.
Pain taught you. Suffering taught you. Hopelessness and an aversion to life taught you the significance of life.
It all comes full circle.

Life.
Life has been kind.
Life is kind.

Give it a chance.

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