How does it feel when most people you loved - are gone from your life?
I had a 96 year old paternal great grandma living with us for the last 10 years of her life. When I was 7 till I was 17.
We often talked, as I was always fond of the elderly and always curious about their life stories,
She sometimes told me that everybody she had known and loved had gone, including her 8 siblings. She told me there were more dead than the alive people in her dreams.
I often felt like she was a lonely soul left wondering on Earth and I felt sad to imagine that almost everyone she had ever loved and called her home - was gone and this new world was strange and unfamiliar to her.
Of course, she loved her children and grandchildren but it’s probably a bit different, to outlive friends, parents, siblings, a spouse.
She always missed her children but only my grandpa and my family was responsible enough to take care of her.
Other two sons didn’t visit, she always asked about them, sometimes I wrote her letters by their name and put under her pillow at night.
She’d wake up in the morning and I told her to check what her sons have sent to her and she loved it. Those were the moments she was truly happy.
I feel like she was an important person of my life, because she taught me empathy and care and to cherish every moment of my life and enjoy it, because I, too, might be like her someday. Without anyone I ever loved or knew by my side and I’d want to know that while I had my loved ones around me, I appreciated every moment spent with them.
My maternal late grandpa once said
“We’ll lose so many people on the road of life, if we grieve too much, we’ll spend whole life grieving. Let it go. Life goes on.”
Probably that’s what life teaches us eventually and that’s how we can keep living, aching for what we’ve lost, but still loving life and wanting to hold on it tightly.
