"Gone Away"

"And it feels
Yeah it feels like Heaven's so far away.
And it feels
Yeah it feels like the world has grown cold
Now that you've gone away.".

If I envy anyone in this world, it would be the people who have never felt the grief of losing someone they love.
One can appreciate the sympathies of others who hear about your loss. Anyone who's lost someone they not only respected and appreciated but someone whom they deeply felt for, knows that nearly nothing else can instill the sheer emotional pain and grief only losing a loved one can. In such dark times, the support of others means more than those showing their support can ever know. But the support from family and friends is not nearly enough to raise one up from such a low.
With any kind of significant personal loss there is a time to grieve, be it the stripping of certain freedoms, or the disbanding of a close friendship, or the loss of certain material property or the death of a loved one. We all grieve in our own way and move on from it in our own time.
When death strikes close to home we cannot help but be affected by it in some way; notably, mentally and emotionally changed, for better or for worse. Who we become in the aftermath, what we take from the experience, is very much up to us.



Grieving helps us come to terms with our loss. It is a natural thing humans do. Just as it would not be viewed as courageous to not grieve, there is no cowardice in grieving. It is a complex process that greatly varies in length from person to person. However, it is generally divided into three stages: Shock or numbness, disorganization, and re-organization.


In the first stage, "shock", immediately after hearing about the loss, it seems that there is nothing left to feel; Nothing but the unreality that something so horrid could happen to someone you know.
When it happened to me, the entire world dissolved. As far as I was concerned, everything that mattered was gone. A part of me fought the terrible news, kept wanting to believe that it didn't happen. How could it have happened? She didn't deserve to die. She was planning to come up north in a year or so. All the adversity we'd faced in such a short time, it was all supposed to be for something; a happy ending. No, it couldn't be. I remember my senses failing, only being able to see through my mind's eye. Visions of her and I flashed before me. Visions of the past, all we'd shared and all would gone through; Visions of the future, a future that would never be. Even in the following weeks, I struggled to cope with the idea of never seeing her smiling face ever again.
This state of shock can last from a few hours to many months. From there, one moves from the first stage to the second: disorganization.


When we say "disorganization" in this context, it is referring to the state of our minds and how confused and irrational our thoughts may be. In this stage, our emotions and rationale can be pushed to the limits; we may begin to feel anger towards the loved one for dying; guilty for letting a loved one die/ unresolved issues; remorse for things said or done that negatively affected the deceased. Also, often enough, one may replay the events leading up to the death, thus, in a sense, reliving the experience over and over again. Most people recover, but it may take weeks, months, or, to some degree, years.

Once it'd finally settled in, the fact that she was gone and I was still here without her, the first thing I felt when my senses returned to me was anger. Anger towards myself for allowing her to get her hopes up about a possible future together; for putting her through all the trials we'd been through. I later felt guilty for feeling such blasphemous feelings about us. I blamed myself and my infamously bad luck for what had happened (going so far as to say that if it hadn't been her and me, she'd have been fine). After weeks of beating myself up, I mellowed out quite a bit. A lot actually. I would spend hours on end just sitting and thinking of her and crying and wishing I could've seen her, spoken to her one last time. It didn't last forever though...


After a while, you will go through periods where you don't dwell on what has happened and begin to carry on with your life. This is known as the "re-organization" stage. For me, I would say that it took about a month and a half to reach this stage.
When I reached this stage, I was able to smile and laugh and joke around for real rather than to hide how sad I really felt and trick others into thinking I was alright. This didn't mean I was over what had happened. I was still sad much of the time but considerably less. One way I was able to cope through this time was because of a quote I'd come across while surfing the net in the past: "Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened." The other thing that really helped me move along was a letter she'd written before her death. She'd entrusted it to one of my best friends who'd passed it on to me the day after she'd died. She told me to keep my head up; to be strong for both myself and the friends that relied on me (at the time); to move on and live a happy life. She told me she loved me. From then on, I slowly began to rebuild myself, to reorganize my life after it had been shattered.

We are never the same after going through such a devastating turn of events. We take from it several things. Perhaps a different outlook on life (or death) or maybe the relationships between you and those who were there in your time of sorrow have strengthened. The most important thing, I believe, is you never forget your loved ones. You carry them with you wherever you go, their very essence somehow seeps into your being and it is through you that they live forever. People see them through your actions and your personality. That being said, we should do our best to honor these people with how we live, living as if they were still actually among us, never wanting to do anything that would disgrace them or hurt them or others.
September 20th, it will have been two years. Two years since she passed away. Two years since she's been living through me.