Anyone who has experienced significant loss knows about the hole that forms in your heart where your loved one once existed. That spot—the spot that was filled with the presence and being of someone we love—becomes filled with emptiness.
It's hard to explain how we can become so incredibly consumed with something that leaves us feeling so incredibly empty, but we do. And it's a powerful feeling. Absence is powerful. Grief is powerful. It's probably one of the most powerful things we can feel...the only emotion that even comes close to it is love, because love is why we know how devastating it is to lose.
While over time, the impact of the hole in our hearts might become less severe and the power it has over our thoughts might slowly fade, it's still there. It never heals all the way over, meaning it's always at risk to being opened back up.
It can be something as simple as a smell or the lyric of a familiar song that can jolt us back to the beginning, back to when our heartache was raw and present in every moment of every day. These jolts are hard to rebound from—but we can rebound. We don't have to let them hold us back, but we can't always do it alone. We need others around helping push us forward.
What makes grief hard to both deal with and to help others through is that it's different for everyone. Different stages happen at different cadences for different people. There's no guide that tells us what to expect or when to expect it, and this is an overwhelming concept to come to terms with.
It's overwhelming to realize that we've lost control over a part of our emotions. We can't predict the days that will wash over us like a tidal wave, just as much as we can't predict that days that will, for some reason, feel a little more bearable than others.
Once we stop trying to predict, we can allow ourselves to accept what is. And once we accept, we can begin to move through. And hopefully, when we can't move through on our own, we can let time take over.
I won't say that time heals all wounds, because there are simply some wounds that never fully disappear. What time does do though, is it helps us find a new normal. It helps us figure out how to exist in a world where someone we love no longer does. And some days, it works better than others.
The best thing we can do for ourselves and for anyone we're supporting is to acknowledge instead of ignore. When we acknowledge that there are days with more moments of heartache in them than others, we help ourselves, and the ones we love, to just feel what is. And to know that they don't have to feel it alone.
The heartache may not be as constant, and it may not exist from the second we wake up until the moment we fall asleep anymore, but some days—birthdays, anniversaries, holidays—remind us of that little hole in our heart. When we acknowledge these days, we allow for the ability to feel the pain for what it is, and then hopefully, leave it behind.
It's for those days that we made this card.