It’s a lesson life will teach you over and over again, no matter what your circumstances are. It’s a lesson God tries to teach us, but we often fail to truly understand the purpose behind it. It’s a lesson in the bittersweet truth that the people we love most are never truly guaranteed to stay.
One day, they are here, they’re calling us, making plans with us and even telling us how much they love us. The next, they’re gone, and we’re left to navigate a world that feels a little emptier, a little colder and a lot more broken than before.
But it’s in the emptiness they leave, in the silence that follows, that we face our darkest fears and demons, because we suddenly feel lost again. Alone again. Scared again. Unsure of what tomorrow will bring. There’s a sense of stability and familiarity that has now been shaken and we’re left trying to pick up the pieces.
There’s no right or wrong way to say goodbye, there’s no perfect farewell, there’s no painless ending but there’s a choice to either stay down or move forward. To stay stuck or keep going. To mourn the loss or start over. There’s a choice and this choice is yours because at the end of the day, you have to learn how to live without the ones you didn’t expect to lose.
You have to learn what it takes to say goodbye, time and time again, until you find a way to hold both their love and absence in your heart at the same time, to carry the memories without being crushed by them and to live in a world reshaped by their absence.
Whether someone leaves intentionally or unintentionally, the biggest and hardest lesson of all is that forever doesn’t last and always isn’t enough. But it is only through God, faith and hope for a better tomorrow that we can begin to accept the loss even when we don’t understand it. It is through our faith and commitment to ourselves that we can start to heal without carrying too much damage and that we can trust that, somehow, amidst the pain, the confusion and the chaos, the next chapter won’t be as heavy and the next ending won’t be as sad.
