Losing People

Diverging Venn diagram circles and an emptier future

Journal: 10 November, 2024, morning.

I was thinking this morning about what is lost when you lose people.

I’m the last child in my family, the only one still here. There’s no one left now that I can ask about our family history (who are those people in that faded photograph? Why did that uncle never come home after the war?). There’s no one I can reminisce with about our past, the good times, the tragedies, the joy we shared. I am the only repository now. Most of that history will die with me.

It’s no different than with previous generations, I know, but it’s the only loss I personally know, grieve over.

I think of work colleagues I’ve had over the years, so intensely together for a time, sharing so much, joined in common cause, and then moving on. Never to share anything again. Just ever fading memories of that time.

I think of old romantic relationships, once so alive and promising and hopeful, and then ending, with all those never to be fulfilled dreams still waiting. Where do those dreams go?

Friendships… some you keep, some you lose. Proximity sometimes matters. You lose that and the friendship withers. Commonalities. The kids grow up and your shared activities end and the friendships also. Heart friendships sometimes survive but not always. Sometimes it’s only nostalgia keeping it alive.

When you lose people you lose the future—the future that has them in it. You can keep the memories but that is often more a burden than a consolation because the memories remind you of a future bereft of making any more memories. A door has closed forever.

Perhaps the hardest losing is one you yourself choose to make, against every desire of your heart, but one you feel you must. Irreconcilable differences.

I’m thinking a lot now about loss. It’s unavoidable. I wouldn’t have chosen it, but it’s like a Venn diagram where the circles do not overlap: where is the commonality? I keep searching for it, looking for it, even the tiniest bit of it. I want to believe there’s some still there, that the circles will converge and not keep diverging. The lines of those circles are starkly drawn though.

We live with loss all the time. Life itself is one long letting go of all the things we hold dear, but it never gets easier, and some losses cost more than others, leave us emptier, leave the future emptier.

#journalingalife