There is a blog/website that I follow and today this was an excerpt from their posting. It really touched me and even though it made me sad...it also gave me hope. Hope for better days, hope for less heartache, hope for less tears, hope for our future without Poppa.
How to Find Gratitude When Someone You Love Dies
One of the absolute hardest realities to cope with is death. A person who gave meaning to our life is now no longer in our life (at least not in the flesh), and we are not the same person without them. We have to change who we are—we are now a best friend who sits alone, a widow instead of a wife, a dad without a daughter, or a next-door neighbor to someone new. We want life to be the way it was, before death, and yet it never will be.
But, can we still be grateful we had the gift of this person in our lives? Yes…
When you lose someone you can’t imagine living without, your heart breaks wide open. And the bad news is you never completely get over the loss—you will never forget them. However, in a backwards way, we gradually learned that this is also the good news.
Ultimately, we grew to appreciate that although death is an ending, it is also a necessary part of living. And even though endings like these often seem ugly, they are necessary for beauty too—otherwise it’s impossible to appreciate someone or something, because they are unlimited. Limits illuminate beauty, and death is the ultimate limit—a reminder that we need to be aware of this beautiful person, and appreciate this beautiful thing called life. Death is also a beginning, because while we have lost someone special, this ending, like the loss of any wonderful life situation, is a moment of reinvention. Although deeply sad, their passing forces us to gradually reinvent our lives, and in this reinvention is an opportunity to experience beauty in new, unseen ways and places. And finally, death is an opportunity to celebrate a person’s life, and to be grateful for the beauty they showed us.
