Not Goodbye - I’ll Be Seeing You Again

When we lose someone we love, grief can make their final days feel bigger than the life that came before them. This reflection is about remembering differently - holding onto the laughter, memories, love and energy that remain. Perhaps death is not simply about saying goodbye, but learning to carry someone with us in a different way.

CONNECTIONSTILLNESSCREATION

Nigel Kilford

8/26/20263 min read

Not Goodbye - I’ll Be Seeing You Again

There are moments in life when words seem completely inadequate. The death of someone we love is one of them.

A close friend of mine recently lost a parent after an illness. Yesterday was the funeral, a day that had been dreaded since the loss. There was uncertainty about how to feel, what to do, or even how to get through it. And perhaps there is no correct way. Grief doesn’t come with instructions.

But I reminded my friend of something that I think we sometimes forget when we are surrounded by loss: the funeral is not simply the day we say goodbye. It is the day we finally get to lay the physical body of someone we love to rest.

The love itself does not have to be buried with them. Neither do the memories.

Remember the Life, Not Only the Ending

When somebody dies, it is incredibly easy to allow their death to become the defining memory of their life. We think about the illness. The final days. The hospital. The phone call. The funeral.

But that was only the ending of one chapter. It was not their life.

Their life was every laugh around a kitchen table. Every birthday. Every holiday. Every ridiculous conversation. Every hug. Every disagreement that eventually became insignificant. Every piece of advice. Every ordinary day that we never realised would one day become precious.

Those are the things worth holding onto.

More Than the Body

I believe that we are more than the bodies we inhabit.

The body is extraordinary, but perhaps it is also simply the vessel through which we experience this particular lifetime. We walk around in it, speak through it, touch through it, laugh through it and hold the people we love through it. And then one day that vessel stops.

But I find it difficult to believe that everything else simply disappears.

The consciousness. The connection. The love. The energy that existed between two people.

Whatever our individual beliefs about what comes after this life, love has already demonstrated something remarkable: it survives absence. Someone can be thousands of miles away and we still love them. Someone can disappear from our lives for twenty-five years and the connection can remain. And someone can leave this physical world and still influence the person we become tomorrow.

That is a kind of continuation.

Learning to Carry Them Differently

So perhaps grief is not about learning how to forget somebody. Perhaps it is about learning how to carry them differently.

At first, remembering them may hurt. A photograph might bring tears. A song might suddenly stop you in your tracks. A familiar smell might transport you backwards twenty years in a second.

But gradually, hopefully, those same memories begin to bring something else. A smile. Warmth. Gratitude. And eventually you may find yourself laughing again at something they once said or did.

That isn’t disrespecting their death. It is honouring their life.

The people who truly love us would surely never want their memory to become a permanent source of sadness. They would want us to live. To laugh. To experience things. To tell their stories. To remember the madness, the mistakes, the adventures and the ordinary moments that somehow became extraordinary simply because they were there.

Life will always contain difficult days. Loss is part of loving.

But the darkness of losing somebody should never be allowed to erase the light they brought while they were here.