Aoife Henry

I am a part of all that I have met.

And all that I have lost is a part of me.

Grieving is the process of processing loss. This process is both difficult and necessary. Grief is an oscillation in our minds that vacillates rapidly with great peaks and troughs at first, and hopefully decays with the passing of time and healing to the occasional stinging pulse. The death of someone we have loved is one particularly tragic and painful loss we can experience. But there is so much more we have to lose. We can lose our youth to time, our health to illness, our mental faculties to degradation, our physical prowess to injury, our faith in the future to facts about climate change, our trust in people to the betrayal of a person, our carefree joy to trauma, our passion for our work to our learning of its ineffectiveness, our assumption of the health and happiness of a friend or family to a devastating suicide or diagnosis, a friend to a disagreement or misunderstanding, a love to a misalignment of needs and desires, our motivation to do good to apathy in the face of overwhelming destruction or injustice.

We can lose time, past or future, during which we could have been happy, but for one reason or another, reasons that were perhaps never within our control, and certainly are no longer, we instead spent or will spend in suffering.

Dear reader, I don’t know how best to end this post. 

Part of me wants to conclude with a resounding note of hope, by affirming that some degree of loss is integral to a life led with love and curiosity but ultimately governed by chance. 

Another part of me wants to let you contemplate what you have lost and to allow space for you to grieve, because it is okay to lose and to grieve that loss, and no amount of reassurance on my part can do better than that.

So I will leave it to you, reader, to choose how you would like to close. It is your life to live, and your loss to grieve.