Learning to Carry Love Differently After Loss

Learning to Carry Love Differently After Loss
By: H. Tammy Cha, MSW, LCSW

Trigger warning: If you have recently lost a loved one and are actively in the acute stages of grief, please be advised that this material may intensify your emotions.

When you hear the word death, what do you think of, and how do you feel? Does it evoke fear, anxiety, avoidance, or discomfort? For the majority of us, I think there is something uncomfortable about talking about death and our own mortality. Maybe there is a superstitious part of us that feels like talking about it will somehow cause it to happen to us or someone we love. Or perhaps we avoid talking about it because it is simply something we don't want to think about. We don't want it to happen to us, and we certainly don't want it to happen to someone we love.

In some ways, I find it odd that we don't talk about death more, especially because it is one of the few things that is certain about our lives. At some point, we will all die.

I recently experienced one of the most difficult losses of my life. Without overly personalizing or self-disclosing, I lost someone I was extremely close to and had known nearly my entire life, minus two years because they were two years younger than me. Even writing about them in the past tense feels strange. Saying I "was" close to them or that I "knew" them doesn't feel natural because the relationship and love don't suddenly feel like they belong in the past just because the person is no longer physically here.

In some ways, one could say the outcome was inevitable because this person was extremely ill and had been battling the toughest fight of their life, an illness that would eventually take their human life away, but there was another part of me that had so much hope. I truly believed they were going to overcome this illness and that somehow this was going to become a miraculous success story we would all tell someday. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case.

When I heard the news, it was earth-shattering. My body had a physical response before I think my brain could even fully comprehend what I had heard. My teeth were chattering, my hands were shaking, and I was crying uncontrollably. I went in and out of disbelief, anger, sadness, confusion, and despair. The array of emotions was so intense and so heavy. It is interesting how our bodies physically respond when we lose someone so close to us. Our nervous system can almost go offline, and I could feel mine doing exactly that.

Then there was the regret of not being able to spend more time with them, the missed opportunity to say goodbye, and the realization that this person would never physically be a part of my human existence again. That is something I still grapple with. I go back and forth between denial and acceptance, and for days, my logical brain knew they were gone while my emotional brain seemed completely confused. It was trying to make sense of the last several decades in which this person had simply existed as part of my life.

I could almost feel my brain trying to recalibrate. It kept going back and forth between knowing what happened and being confused about what happened. I think what my brain was trying to understand was permanence. My mind was being given completely new information and somehow had to make sense of a world where this person no longer physically existed. How does your brain comprehend that when it has decades of information telling it otherwise?

I had never known my life without this person. They were part of the fiber of my life and existed within my core memories, my childhood, my adulthood, and even my recent memories. My brain had decades of memories telling me this person existed, and then suddenly it was supposed to understand that they didn't anymore. Even today, my mind is still trying to find its bearings. Sometimes I know exactly what happened, while other times there is still this strange disbelief, almost as though my brain hasn't completely caught up with reality yet.

How come we don't talk about this part of grief? We talk about sadness, crying, and missing someone, but we don't always talk about what it feels like for your brain and body to actually try to comprehend that someone you love is gone. We don't talk enough about the confusion, the physical response, or how strange it is to have decades of memories of someone and suddenly be asked to understand a future where they will no longer be physically present.

If you've experienced losing someone extremely close to you, you probably understand that there really is no way to prepare yourself for the aftermath. No one can completely prepare you for what losing someone does to you emotionally or physically, and maybe that is exactly why we need to talk about death and grief more openly.

I am beginning to realize that grief may not be about figuring out how to stop loving or missing the person who died. Maybe part of grieving is learning how to carry that love differently, because while the person may no longer physically be here, the love we have for them didn't die with them. Maybe finding new meaning isn't about trying to make the loss itself meaningful or finding some reason why it had to happen. Maybe it is about figuring out what we do with all of that love now.

If you're reading this and have experienced something like this, you aren't alone. Grief can feel incredibly isolating, especially when the rest of the world seems to keep moving while you are still trying to understand how yours has changed. I am here to hold space for you, and we can walk through it together. We can process the loss, make meaning of the life and relationship you shared with the person you loved, and find ways to continue loving them, just in a different way.

I don't think grief means that we eventually learn how to leave someone behind. Maybe it means learning how to bring them with us differently. We begin to find ways to carry their memory, their love, the things they taught us, and the ways they shaped who we are into the life that we continue to live. The relationship changes because they are no longer physically here, but that doesn't mean the relationship, or our love for them, simply disappears.

This may mean finding meaning after loss. Not moving on from the person we loved, but learning how to move forward with the love that remains. We can still find meaning and love in a new way….

Rest eternally in peace, our beloved angel, SH.
Love,
누나