When Loss Arrives Without Warning

Sometimes loss doesn’t give you time to prepare. Last Monday, April 27, I suddenly lost a beloved decades long friend.

There was no gradual decline. No long goodbye. Just a moment, and then the world was different.

When someone you’ve known for years, decades even, is suddenly gone, the mind tries to catch up. It looks for continuity where there is none. It replays ordinary moments, trying to understand how something so stable could disappear overnight.

Grief, in these moments, isn’t always loud. It can be quiet, disorienting, almost practical. It can be gathering at a wale and funerary ceremonies with friends you haven't seen in a very long time. We catch-up, we immediately start talking as if we hadn't seen in ages. But the loss, the grief, is there.

For many men, and some women, there is an instinct to move past it quickly. To stay functional. To not linger too long in something that feels like it has no solution. It has no solution. Each of us will deal with it in its own way.

He was here. Now he is not. A part of me is different, he will always stay with me.

[painting: Georgia O'Keeffe - Jimson Weed, 1936]

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