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When Loss Strikes Suddenly…
It was just Valentine’s Day, a day of love and warmth, even for the many of us living through a cold and frigid winter in the northeast. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons that Valentine’s Day is placed in the middle of what’s typically the coldest month of the year – to bring us love and warmth, when love and warmth is needed the most. Certainly it conjures fond memories for many of us, and lets us spend time with that special someone, and create memories anew that we’ll treasure for years to come. But as much as we value these precious times, it’s these very precious times that will ultimately cause the pain and grief when loss strikes suddenly.
Unfortunately, this became markedly evident to me this Valentine’s, as a long time family acquaintance suddenly lost her husband to a heart attack after he slipped into a coma. Needless to say, the shock and pain of losing her soul mate of more than 33 years can’t even begin to be imagined. We may have empathy for such a loss, but there’s no way we can ever feel the pain that someone’s going through when this happens. The loss of losing a loved one, especially suddenly, just compounds the effect that the loss brings.
The closest that I’ve ever come to such a feeling was with the sudden loss of my father, just prior to Valentine’s Day in 2003. I still vividly remember speaking to him on the phone not an hour before my sister called saying that he had a heart attack, and that he most likely wouldn’t make it – he didn’t. The wake was on that long-lost Valentine’s Day, and the burial the next day, which true to February, was a shivering, arctic day featuring a crystal blue sky. With tears on our cheeks, we all stood over the grave as the pastor solemnly offered those final Biblical words of condolence, as comforting as she could.
It’s bizarre how these moments never go lost. They’re etched into our minds, and it often doesn’t take much for our thoughts to go roaring back to that place and time, when loss struck us so suddenly. It was as if the world slowed down, and everything became magnified. We were waiting to awake from a nightmare, a nightmare from which we never awoke, because a nightmare it wasn’t. It was reality.
When loss strikes suddenly, the world turns upside down. What we counted on one moment, is gone the next. It’s change at its worst; it’s change at its most vicious. It’s not so much a matter of coping through such times, as it is a matter of just getting through them. It’s a process, and like so much in life, it’s a process unique to each and every one of us. What works for one, may not work for the other. Only we can know the way to get ourselves through such unbearable times; no one can do it for us. The strength to endure must come from within (see Acceptance, Self-Belief and a Rising Phoenix…). It must come from a self-belief, a self-belief that as shattering and devastating as a sudden loss can be, somehow life is always still worth living, and somehow, no matter what happens, Valentine’s is always a day worth remembering…
For more, check out The C.A.T. Principle: Change, Action, Trust – Words to Live By, a Global Ebook Awards GOLD First Place Winner for Best Non-Fiction Self-Help Ebook of 2014, available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. See the latest Amazon reviews here.
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Well written Al, especially meaningful after my recent loss.