This We Believe
(2009-03-25)
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How does someone who has never personally suffered a loss understand and react to a tragedy like the death of a friend or loved one? The truth is, unless they've experienced it themselves, they have no idea. National tragedies like 9/11 or Pearl Harbor are memorialized to the outside world not only as a representation of a terrible event scarring our history, but also to connect the public to the kind of pain and raw emotion felt by those who were directly affected by such an event. I have no doubt that people who live through these sorts of ordeals are touched forever in a way that can be difficult to explain to others. It is virtually impossible to feel something like loss so heavily and intensely without having experienced it first-hand, and it is even harder to relate to or pay tribute to something so far removed from you. People can attempt to make a connection in some way to either the event or the person who experienced it, but more often than not they don't know what to say, they can only do their best. People are usually unwilling to talk about something that causes them pain despite the widely held belief that communication itself can be healing.
Loss is something that hits very close to home for me it is very real, very personal and impossible for me to share with others. It took my particular belief that time does not heal all wounds for me to sit down, collect and organize my thoughts into some coherency. Losing my dad is still a painful topic. He is the biggest loss I've ever experienced. I could tell you I feel like there is a broken record playing in my head over and over again of the night my dad died, and I could tell you that I've come to accept it, that it was just "his time to go". But then of course I'd be lying, and I'm not that good a liar. I don't believe it was his time, and it takes all the strength in the world for me not to hate my dad every day for dying before I got the chance to know anything about him. I know that I am not angry with him directly, I'm angry with the situation I was dealt, and even that is futile. My anger is not going to bring him back. I want to know things about him, but the problem with this loss is that my family doesn't want to talk about it. Telling funny stories or revealing any tidbit of information is masked behind this big black curtain of pain that prevents anyone from just coming out and saying anything honest about him or his life. Being honest, however brutal it may be, is important in coming to terms with the way things were and now are.
I have more anger pent up inside of me than I know what to do with, and thus the reason I believe that time does not heal all wounds it's been eight years and I still feel like I've been living in slow motion. I can't get it out of my head; it's always with me, like a 500-pound weight on my shoulders and my chest. Sometimes it's even hard to breathe. There are numerous things I could elaborate on, but the point is that I've been living with this giant emptiness, just as many other people across the world do. And not being able to talk about it with people who have a common loss only adds to that hurt. The point is that time doesn't make things better it might calm the storm, but I don't dare take off my raincoat because it's still going to be there. So we deal with it to the best of our ability, and hope that constructing memorials for ourselves personally or for others externally will make the loss possible to understand. Not everyone loses a parent at a young age, and not everyone was there on a day history was changed forever. But we can at the very least be honest and open about it, and not sugar-coat or deny that it will always hurt.
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