Loss: As Viewed by Gail Caldwell (And Me)

Shortly after Christmas, I read Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship by Gail Caldwell. A few months earlier, I had come across the book in a small book store in the outer banks of North Carolina. It was too expensive for me to buy at the time, but I sat down and read about 30 pages, instantly falling in love. I'm drawn to anything that attempts to express grief and/or loss as I experienced, but couldn't articulate, it/them.

You can't imagine the incomparable pain, the hopelessness, the relentless longing for what's lost, unless you've personally had someone very close pass away. You want the world to stop, because your world has stopped. But it doesn't, it keeps going, and it expects you to keep moving forward too.

Gail Caldwell expresses this really well:

"Mostly I couldn't bear... the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead."

I could easily relate to the next two quotes:

"Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive."
— Gail Caldwell (Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship)

"The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it."
 — Gail Caldwell (Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship)

Not only do you want your entire world to stop, but you don't want it to ever start up again. If you feel how I felt (and I'm assuming Caldwell felt), it seems almost like a betrayal to move on and continue your life. As long as you're feeling that excruciating pain, the loved one is still an active part of who you are, a part of your life. The pain serves as a constant, stinging reminder that you haven't forgotten about them, you haven't started moving forward. But, recovery manages to sneak in no matter how hard you fight it. Hope slips in and at first it feels like you're violating your lost loved one. Just the thought of moving forward while loved one can't is an amazingly difficult concept to fathom. Nonetheless, hope exists so your world continues forward, even if it seems like that's the last thing you want. You'd otherwise stay stagnant, overwhelmed, and overcome....(which is tempting but unrealistic).

"Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days."
— Gail Caldwell (Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship)

So, while we can never stop or really even prevent death (because inevitably everyone will die), we can find some comfort in who our loved one was to us. We can share how that person helped us become who we are and how beautiful that person was. "Memory was all that eternal life really meant"... and that person lives on through our memories of them and our outward expression of said memories. In the end, that's all we really can hold on to.

"I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures."
— Gail Caldwell (Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship)

"It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, and epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners of human connection."
— Gail Caldwell (Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship)