The phone rang and you knew why.

You knew it was the call that would tell you that the person you love and cherish is gone.

What a strange word: Gone.

The dictionary defines that word as "no longer present; departed," but what do we as human beings define it as?

You see, the word is everywhere: In titles of books and movies, in the lyrics of your favorite songs, in a text from your mom saying that she's just "gone to the grocery store" and "what do you need," in the shimmering strip of the sunset that says "the sun is now gone, but it will return," on the sign in the bait shop on the corner that reads "gone fishing," in the phrase "gone but never forgotten" and nearly everywhere else in between.

The word is used so casually throughout the English language that when you hear it for the first time in reference to a person who has passed it shocks you. It makes you tremble and weep. It causes chemical reactions in your brain to trigger signals that tell you something is off, something is missing.

The dictionary's definition to the word gone is so mediocre.

It relays the fact that 'okay, these people are gone, but are they gone for a small amount of time... or forever?' The word can only be defined by context and I think that that is what makes it one of the most difficult words in the English language to use. Such a simple word that can either carry no emotion or more emotion than anyone could've ever imagined.

Growing up, at least to me, death was never actually real. But then you experience your first funeral, where you are the one in the line of relatives at the front of the funeral home hugging people and listening over and over to the "I'm sorry's" and the "He/she loved you so much."

It doesn't affect you until it does.

The people you have never even met before telling you how much this beloved person of yours loved and adored you seems to only make it worse. You begin to remember all the times that they hugged you and squeezed you and you rolled your eyes because you had had a long day in 7^th grade and were too tired to reciprocate the love. It brings back the last phone call, the last goodbye, the thoughts of "did I say I love you?" or the questioning of was I being a raging b**ch the last time I left them?

It's hard.

You start to focus on the times you should've squeezed a little harder in that bear hug, the times you should've begged them to stay and tell you one more story and the times you should've flown out to visit when they asked, and it makes the loss that much harder. But then you cope and you actually listen to the people that tell you how much so and so loved you, regardless of your faults and your moody attitudes. How much they boasted about you and every achievement you ever made, and it slowly becomes a little easier.

Death is real.

Death is in the form of your beloved grandparent, mother, father, brother, sister, best friend, anyone. It's someone being ripped out of your life for no apparent reason other than the biblical definition of it being "their time."

Part of you, in the beginning, believes that it's completely unfair, and sometimes it is. But sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it's your grandpa not feeling the need to obtain the strength to recover from surgery because his beloved wife of 50 years is waiting for him at the gates of heaven, and to him, that is far better than living on earth with anyone else. And that's what you have to believe in, the peace of life after death, for them, maybe not for us who are still here, but for them.

So for now, we will put pictures of you on empty seats at our weddings, we will cheers to you before every family holiday celebration, we will talk to you when we know you'd have the answer were seeking and we will hold you in our hearts forever.

Until we meet again.