Miss Your Loved Ones Who Have Passed, and When it Hurts, Miss Them Harder

The empty chair at the dinner table, the automated voice at the dead end of a phone call relaying that the number has been disconnected, the longing to tell a story about something that happened in your day, something you know they would laugh at, they would be proud of, they would be overjoyed to hear— these are the things that eat us alive when grieving the death of a loved one, the things that bring about a sense of emptiness within our souls that cannot be filled with anything this earth has to offer.

The ever present feeling of missing them consumes our very existence: the desire to hear their voice, to feel their touch, to simply know they are there—how excruciating it is to miss someone.

But while missing them is such an overwhelmingly agonizing state of being, I have found that it is not the worst part of coping with the death of those we love. We can miss a person for various reasons aside from death—a long lost friend due to a friendship that has faded, a beloved solider due to having been deployed overseas, a past lover due to a relationship that has failed. While the intensity may be drastically more potent, missing a person is by no means unique to death.

What is unique to death, however, is the ceased existence of a life. That perhaps sounds foolish of me to say, as the definition of death itself is the ending of a life, but I simply cannot seem to fathom the idea that when a life has come to an end, the world is utterly unaffected— how devastating it is to think that life was so painfully irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. When death falls upon someone who is near and dear to us, our entire world comes crashing down, but the rest of the world does not bat an eye. The sun still rises and sets each day; people go to work, children go to school, the world continues to go on despite our own world having come to a screeching halt.

Death is not rare—people die everyday, and we are forced to accept this and continue on as if a piece of our hearts have not just been ripped from our chests because everyone else will be continuing on just the same, as the world does not stop for anyone, for any loss.

I lost my grandfather about six months ago, and my family is still heavily grieving from such an impactful loss. He was an incredible man, and the loss of such an incredible person has lead to an incredibly massive hole in our hearts. I miss him dearly, but what truly devastates me is battling with the idea that the loss of someone so significant to me is so insignificant to the rest of the world.

Everyone should have known him; every single person on this earth should have known him because they would have been better people if they did—I know I am a better person having known him.

And I can say with the utmost certainty that I am not alone in feeling this despair, in feeling as though because the world has lost such a remarkable person when we lose a loved one that the entire world should be grieving the loss, and in finding it to be immensely unfair for the rest of the world to continue on just as it did when they were alive, as though losing them does not matter at all.

That is by far the hardest part.

So when you think missing a person you have lost is so horrendous, miss them even harder. Bathe in the despair, soak in the tears that come with the territory of death, feel the emptiness with you wherever you go. When you feel the emptiness of them being gone, you are filling the world with the memory of when they were here. There are billions of people out there who never got the chance to meet them, and now don’t get the chance to miss them, but you did, and you do. Missing them may bring about a magnitude of pain that at times can be downright unbearable, but if you attempt to shield yourself from missing them in fear of that, the world will not miss them either, and what a tragedy that would be.

You singlehandedly hold the power to keep the memory of an entire lifetime in existence, a power that is only held by the few people who were fortunate enough to have been a part of it.To miss someone is to remember them, and to remember is to keep them a part of this world, a world so vast that it would fail to recall the life of a single human being without your help.

It is quite an extraordinary power, if you think about it, so do not fear it— use it.