HOW DARE THE SUN RISE WHEN MY HEART IS IN SHAMBLES?

LOVE, LOSS

"When you do not understand fully ‘the now’, how can you know about

tomorrow? When you do not know anything about living, how can

you understand death?"

It is a heavy and an unbearable realization that someday, the person who is the very center of your being, will not be there. Why does it have to be that way? Why we can’t we all just live forever? We search for the essence of death, wondering what purpose it could possibly serve that love alone couldn't. It feels like a setup, doesn’t it? To be encouraged to create bonds so deep and connections so consuming, only to have life rip them apart in the end. It feels cruel. It feels very intentional. Like life dares us to love with everything we have, knowing full well it will eventually take that person away.

For a long time, there is this steady assumption; a belief that the people we love will always be available to us. Whether it’s the person you wake up next to every morning, the parents who have known you since your first breath, or the friends who have seen you through every version of yourself, their presence feels as important as the ground beneath your feet. You don't think about the air until you're gasping for it and then, just thinking about their absence makes you catch your breath.

We think it's the big moments we'll mourn, but it’s the ordinary moments, the sound of their laughter over something ridiculous. It’s the sound of their voice in the middle of the night, asking if you’re okay because you moved in your sleep. It’s the way their hand feels in yours. We’ll miss the arguments, the silence, the kind of quiet where just being in the same room was enough.

Death is crazyyyyyyyy! It doesn’t just take a person; it takes the everyday. It steals the routines. It takes the hugs we thought we’d have tomorrow and the conversations we kept putting off because we thought there was time. When that day comes, nothing prepares you for the emptiness. You wonder how you’re supposed to go about your mornings. How you’re supposed to face big feats and family events, knowing that a piece of your heart is permanently missing.

The anger hits you sometimes. You get furious at life, at time and at the unfairness of a world that keeps going while you're sulking. How dare the sun rise when your heart is in shambles? How dare people laugh in the street? How dare the world ask you to keep breathing when the person you need most is no longer there?

Some days, the memory of a small, stupid thing they did brings a smile; other days, that same memory brings you to tears. Some days, you are just numb, as if your heart has decided it cannot carry the weight of the loss just yet, so it shuts down to survive.

Even in the weight of it, there is love, because if it didn’t hurt this much, it wouldn’t have meant anything. The pain is the proof for a bond that was real. That is the one thing death cannot touch, the mark they leave on you. The habits they taught you, the jokes they made you laugh at, the small ways they changed how you see the world.

We don’t know when the day will come. We don’t know how we will survive it, but there is a necessity to learn to carry this thought alongside the reality of the living. We have to learn to love more fully, to laugh louder and to hug tighter today. We have to say the things we think we have time to say later.

One day, the later won’t exist and all that will remain is memory, love, grief and the ache of what we lost and maybe, somehow, that will have to be enough. To imagine a life without them is part of loving someone deeply, to realize that while your world may stop, the world itself doesn't.