sudden loss

Feeling Very Loved – Day 1047

Posted on by Lisa Weikel 2 Comments
Expressions of Love & Caring – Photo: L.Weikel

Feeling Very Loved

Man oh man, it’s been a week. Wait. What? It’s not over yet, you say? Well, I guess that’s technically true (and not a little scary). All I can say at this moment, though, is that I’m feeling very loved – and I have all of you to thank for that.

When I wrote my post last Sunday night, I was worried. I’d intended to write another anthropomorphized vegetable tale, but obviously that silliness was pre-empted. I may or may not regain the light-hearted silliness required to write about the carrot that arrived from the CSA last weekend.

As most of you know, it doesn’t matter what I may have tucked in the back of my mind as a possible topic on any given evening. Ultimately, I always opt to share my state-of-being in the moment. And I could feel in my bones that, even though he just seemed ‘punk’ throughout the day, Spartacus’s malaise was rapidly degrading into something far more concerning.

Community of Compassion

I want to tell all of you how much your words and gestures of love and compassion have meant to me this week. The first few days of the week were a blur of action and driving and shock. The next few felt like a slow-motion pileup of emotions – as well as that weird unable-to-catch-your-breath feeling of having the wind knocked out of you. That’s the feeling that accompanies sudden, irretrievable loss. It’s like a WOMP right to the solar plexus.

My wish is that none of you ever have to feel it. But of course, I know many of you already have. Whether you have or you haven’t experienced that feeling, reading about it is a gift. Not a gift to you necessarily. But definitely a gift to the writer. It’s a gift that you gut through it long enough to share in the emotions as hard as they may be to read, and then – even more amazingly – take the time to write a comment in response.

Can I tell you how much it meant to me to pull up FB on my phone and just see how many people had reacted? And then the shock of seeing the number of comments? I felt arms around me and a solidarity of shared compassion just in looking at those numbers.

To be honest, I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to read your sweet and loving comments until yesterday. It was a comfort simply to know you cared enough to write to me. I needed to wait a full day to take the time to scroll through them and then truly take in your love.

We Are Kindred Spirits

The level of compassion and understanding with which so very many of you responded was enlightening. The heartfelt responses I received from you were not a reflection of the quality of my writing. No. They were a reflection of the love that each and every one of you has experienced first-hand. Experienced – and then been forced to release into the ethers. Because that’s the nature of our lives.

The array of responses revealed something else, too: You’re all a bunch of lovers. We love and we let go.

The fact that I’m lucky enough to have so many people (from all over the world, I might add) in my life, sharing this journey, holding each other’s hands when any one of us is hurting, is a treasure. It’s not easy to live our lives with awareness. It’s hard to choose to feel – and not run from the hard stuff.

Thank you for being the kind softies you all revealed yourselves to be. I love being part of our community of compassion. I dare say it’s because we have each other that we pick ourselves up every day and refuse to give in to the darkness that threatens all of us every once in a while.

(T-64)

He’s Actually Gone – Day 1044

Posted on by Lisa Weikel 4 Comments
I Love You, Spartacus – Photo: L. Weikel

He’s Actually Gone

Trying to write this post is a nightmare. Believe me, I don’t want to. It stuns me that it’s necessary. Eulogizing my beloved Spartacus seems redundant. Any attempt – inadequate. I’m going to have to let the million posts I wrote that referenced him and his mother Sheila speak for themselves. I don’t want to believe he’s actually gone. But he is.

The photo that was at the top of last night’s post was taken at 2:00 p.m. yesterday. The rapidity with which his health situation crashed was stunning. The doctors have no clue as to his illness’s etiology.

All I know is that our veterinarian and the emergency veterinarian both were at a loss. His blood work showed his liver and kidneys were failing. He was septic – apparently very much so, according to his blood sugar. And the chances of bringing him back from the brink of reuniting with his mommy, Sheila, were extremely slim.

Hangin’ on the porch – Photo: L. Weikel

Small Comfort

As with all loss, especially the kind that sneaks up and smacks you in the head from behind, questions abound. Regrets, second-guessing, and ‘what-ifs’ swirl unmercifully in your head, and even more so in your heart. While intellectually you might know without a doubt that the one lost (and here I’m making no distinction between the objects of our love) knew they were loved and adored – it is small comfort in the face of the fact that suddenly they’re gone.

Squeaky toy, muddy paws; Photo: L.Weikel

And Yet, It’s Everything

I think that’s probably the most excruciating part about being a human. It’s both the awareness of love and the persistence of that awareness once the beloved is gone. Because it’s that persistence of awareness that stops us in our tracks when we remember they’re gone. And it’s the persistence of that awareness that’s reflected in the pain we humans are terrified of knowing. At least that’s been my experience.

Pain is the direct 1:1 reflection of the depth of the love. It can feel unfathomable.

I love with my whole heart, without restriction. And when I lose an object of my love (particularly unexpectedly) the pain ‘goes there.’ It is hard to see straight for a time. And it’s tempting to wish I’d never opened myself up to being hurt so deeply, to being left so vulnerable.

The Four S’s – Photo: L.Weikel

And Then I Remember

I remember the joy. I remember what’s truly important about life and living.

Knowing the pain, I love all the more. In fact, I yearn to bring more love into my life. I’m not a glutton for punishment. I just know. Love is what lives forever. And it’s the most powerful force in existence.

Sheila and Spartacus Reunited 9/20/21 – 5 days shy of one year exactly; Photo: L.Weikel

(T-67)

Evidence – Day 889

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Evidence – Photo: L. Weikel

Evidence

I remember the night after we received the call about Karl’s death. Twenty four hours after we received the news, we were attending a cross-country track team banquet. We kept our loss quiet, the three of us pretty much navigating the festivities on auto-pilot. (Our middle son was making his way home from another state where he was working his first job.) Oddly that night remained in my memory – not because of the cross-country banquet – but because of the evidence we received of a truth much bigger than ourselves that night.

I distinctly remember walking out of the church basement where the meal had been served and feeling the overwhelming beauty of the sunset practically pound me on the chest. The reds, oranges, purples, and blues all seemed to wrap themselves around me in a literal embrace of love and knowing. I felt my son’s arms around me. He was there. He was more palpably close to us in that moment than he’d been a week earlier, when he was still in his body.

The photo I took of that powerful sunset was the background on my iPhone for years from that day forward. Evidence that Karl’s essence did not die with his body.

Tonight

I’m recalling that night tonight because another family I know is encountering a similar life-altering reality – an adult son lost in a car accident.

I don’t know the details, whether he died last night or this morning, but I know that tonight was the first full day of him being ripped from the fabric of their lives. I’d been thinking about his family all day, remembering the shock of trying to wrap my head around the fact that I would never see my eldest son alive again. It doesn’t compute. It takes a while. And it makes you feel nauseated every time you try.

As we walked this afternoon and crested our favorite hill for weather and astral observations, we could clearly see rain cascading from the clouds in the distance. It felt like a metaphor – my holding space for them from afar as the rain pelted down in their lives.

Photo: L. Weikel

But about an hour later, another moment arrived. A sign, a message, a small but potentially powerful indicator that, while the pain is exquisite and they may feel they’re drowning in their loss, his spirit shines on.

It’s in times like these, of sudden shock and great loss, that we owe it to those we’ve lost to take solace in their best efforts to send us signs of their continued existence – and undying love.

Yes, we yearn for signs when tragedy strikes. But who are we to deny those who’ve departed our respect for their best efforts to reach out, make contact, and comfort us?

(T-222)

In the Blink of an Eye – Day 476

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Cloud sunset – Photo: L. Weikel

In the Blink of an Eye

A couple things came to my attention today that drive home the adage that ‘everything can change in the blink of an eye.’

Not that I’m unfamiliar with the floor of my world dropping out from under me. But the feeling that accompanies drastic change in our lives (usually on the ‘awful’ end of the spectrum), is rarely something we want to repeat or actively seek.

One occurrence that shook me was seeing a friend of the family post on FB that their home was lost in a fire this morning. A home in which two girls spent their entire lives growing up – charred beyond measure. Treasured and irreplaceable family heirlooms – up in smoke. Worse yet? Family pets. All but one (a cat receiving medical treatment tonight) presumed or confirmed dead.

Loss

This family has been on my mind all day. I sit in my home of 35 years, surrounded by my beloved pups and kits, and my heart can only flirt with the sorrow and horror I’d feel to lose so much in such a ravaging manner.

And while I absolutely value the preciousness of all life and am grateful human lives were spared, I imagine the loss of photos and journals, and a myriad of other utterly unique, tangible items that were artifacts of lives lived by their ancestors leave a terribly raw and open wound in their hearts. It’s precisely the irreplaceable nature of these items that make their loss tragic.

The loss is stark. Only memories remain. And these realizations of impermanence are harsh.

The Little Things

I imagine that shock has probably overcome the family by now. A certain numbness to the magnitude of loss takes over so we don’t implode on ourselves.

The big stuff, in many ways, is probably most easily replaceable. It may not be Grandma’s four poster bed, but a beautiful bedroom set can be acquired. Same with many other ‘things’ we surround ourselves with in our homes.

No, the excruciating pain will probably come in the form of a daily drip of realizing all the little things that have been lost. Stuff we all take for granted. Little things that are so ingrained as a part of our daily lives that it’s not until we reflexively look for them or think, “That must be in the attic…” that we realize yet again what’s gone.

And the worst part may be that intangible loss: that feeling of being swept out of that home and off that land – no matter how large or small the plot of earth that stood beneath their house. That sense of possibly never sleeping there again, the impact of realizing they may never look out windows onto the familiar trees or grass or skyline they’ve lived with and gazed upon for decades, will only gradually dawn on them.

When others experience horrific tragedies, it’s only human to empathize and reflect upon how we would feel if thrust into the same circumstances.

In the blink of an eye, everything can change for any of us. It is cliché, perhaps, to suggest that we look around and appreciate our lives and circumstances. But nevertheless, it behooves us to do it. Take a moment. Look around you. Appreciate your many blessings.

And send compassion and courage to those who, in the blink of an eye, have lost so much.

Photo: L. Weikel

(T-635)

Binge-Eating – Day 441

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The evidence – Photo: L. Weikel

Binge-Eating

You caught me.

I don’t know what’s come over me as I sit here trying to think of something to write this evening. But yikes, it’s not pretty.

I’ve been sitting here on my couch, contemplating the thoughts parading through my head, writing a sentence here and a paragraph there. Then deleting them, one after another.

I’ve written about Kobe Bryant and his daughter, Gianna. I’ve written about a crucial fact that we all live with, but barely any of us acknowledge truthfully and head on: in spite of our best laid plans, it can all be over in the blink of an eye.

I’ve been sitting here thinking about Kobe’s wife and other daughters. How when they woke up this morning, none of them knew their lives would be changed irrevocably, forever.

True For All of Us

But let’s face it: that’s true for all of us. At any moment, everything could change for any one of us – or for all of us, for that matter.

And yes, many of us have already experienced nightmarish events in which everything has changed in the blink of an eye. But that fact doesn’t make it any easier to witness it happening to someone else. Just because I’ve felt the horror of receiving the phone call we all dread doesn’t mean I’d wish it on anyone else.

Indeed, it makes me grieve all the more for the survivors. It makes me think of the families of the people who were killed on that Ukrainian airliner that was shot down a few weeks ago. Those people have to deal with the utter senselessness of that tragedy.

It makes me wonder what we’re going to witness when our greatest hopes are challenged by our worst fears later this week, when weak-willed people potentially fail to heed the call of our future ancestors to do what’s right instead of what’s politically expedient for their own selfish ends.

So I Binge

I hold out hope that those representing us in Washington will seize this time of the new moon and think beyond themselves, beyond their fears of getting primaried, beyond their fear of being bullied and ridiculed by the least among us (who also happen to hold the most power at the moment).

And since I can only hold fast to my hope that the people who’ve been elected to the Senate have a deep and abiding love for our system and for the solemn responsibility they hold to all of us, I embody that hope by imagining them digging deep and holding strong to our collective core values.

I hold that vision. That, and binge-eat peanuts.

I don’t know about you, but I consider peanuts in the shell to be terribly addictive. Worse than potato chips.

And so I pound them down. (I should never succumb to that first one. Therein lies the key.)

Eating. It’s such an essential aspect of life and living; an affirmation that we’re still here. And as long as we’re here, we must hold fast to our hope. For ourselves and for each other.

New Moon and Venus – Photo: L. Weikel

(T-670)