Too Many Goodbyes

 My heart feels heavy today.

It is carrying a lot of sadness.

Eight years of watching the disease of addiction take more and more of my daughter, until eventually I lost her completely.

And then there is my grandmother.

She came to live with me in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s.

Of all the people in my life, she was one of the people I loved and trusted the most.

She was someone who made me feel safe.

And then I had to watch the disease slowly take her farther and farther away from me.

At first, there were little things.

Things she forgot.

Moments that didn’t quite seem like her.

And then there came a time when she didn’t know me anymore.

That kind of loss is difficult to explain.

Because the person you love is still physically there, but pieces of the relationship begin disappearing before they do.

It feels like a death before the death.

And there have been other losses too.

So many goodbyes.

The last was my partner.

He had been my rock through so many of the losses in my family.

When so much of what was familiar to me was disappearing, he was the person who remained.

And then I lost him too.

His absence left a tremendous hole in my heart.

I think about how many goodbyes my heart has had to endure.

Watching someone slowly disappear.

Letting go.

Losing.

Then learning how to live with the empty space they leave behind.

Maybe that is why my heart feels so heavy today.

Sometimes we grieve someone while they are still sitting right in front of us.

Sometimes we say goodbye a thousand times before we ever say the final one.

And perhaps that is what my heart is carrying now.

Not just the loss of my daughter.

Not just the loss of my grandmother.

Not just the loss of my partner.

But all the goodbyes.

All the pieces of people I loved that disappeared long before I was ready to let them go.

I have survived so many endings.

But surviving them doesn’t mean they didn’t leave a mark.

Today, I don’t think I need to make the sadness go away.

Maybe I just need to let my heart be heavy.

To honor what was lost.

To honor how deeply I loved.

Because perhaps the depth of the grief is also evidence of the depth of the love.