It's hard to put into words just how one feels when the end is near for a loved one, friend, acquaintance, or stranger. There's a strange discolored and muddled mixture of regret, hope, fear, and the inexplicable feeling of how unfair it is, how if only there was just a bit more time. You desperately cling to the hope, the tiny sliver of just pure hope — untainted, misguided, and incredibly naïve — that they will be OK.
But you know they won't be.
You look back on all the time you've spent with them in the past and see all the mistakes laid out in front of you like puzzles pieces slowly consolidating. You want to scream at how much your anger, frustration, and blatant disregard of your loved one has now trickled down to corrupt your memories of your loved one. You just feel so much regret. The regret consumes your thoughts and conscience. There needs to be more time, you tell yourself, you have to fix your mistakes you say. And just like that, just as soon as you realize how much that someone means to you, meant to you, just when you realize the extent to which you cannot live without them, they're gone. Just like that.
The sheer delicacy of human life is something that cannot be fully comprehended: everything can potentially extinguish it, but it just keeps going. Even the smallest human life continues to experience, to interact with the world and the warm and comforting light of life continues to glow even when fully gone. The place still felt a faint patch of warmth. Its afterglow warms just as much as the initial flame, just in a different way. In a subtler way. It comes to you much later in the future when you're sitting in the coffee shop, it comes to you when you walk down the street to your workplace, it comes to you as you're relaxing on your bed getting ready to sleep.
Something so quiet and delicate you can hardly identify what it is at first.
It is warmness.
It makes you believe everything will be OK.
You are OK.
You have not been abandoned.
Their love is just in a different subtler form.
Some days it'll be hard to repress, to not feel, to push away the pain and pretend you are okay. Some days it'll be hard to feel like you're not missing one of the most important individuals in your life. Some days it'll be hard to be you, to feel some source of identity to ground yourself.
Some days it'll just be hard. So incredibly hard you have no idea how you'll continue, how you'll manage to muster up the energy to drag your tired and defeated self to just continue. It'll be hard for a long time and then one day it just won't. The tears will dry and transform. The tears become the heartiness to your laugh, the tears become the brightness behind your million-dollar smile, the tears become the warmth you feel when you think of your loved one.
You've cried enough tears, you've been brave, you've made them proud. Now it's time you let yourself feel again. It's time to leave the cold and darkness of the cave. It is now spring, the time to see all the beautiful colors of the new world. It's time to make a new beginning from a painful end. It is time to live again in the warm afterglow. It is time to say goodbye.
