You cannot prevent the hole that death creates in someone’s absence, in your own. You can decide what you put into the world before you leave it.
Maybe you’re the one who’s going.
Maybe you’re the one who’s staying.
When a terminal illness takes hold, and we’re forced to face the body’s fragility, there’s a little space also to face the strength of the soul.
Say the thing.
Say I love you. Say I’m scared. Say I’m angry. Say Thank you. Say I don’t want to go. Say I don’t want you to go.
Ask the question you’ve been afraid to ask. Tell the story you’ve told a hundred times. Tell them the story they’ve never heard. If it’s sitting on your heart, there’s probably a reason it’s there.
Don’t “keep it together.”
Sob. Laugh. Yell. Whisper. Sing.
With tears and snot running down your face. Forget the tissues. Raw emotion that comes from the deepest well of love doesn’t need to be cleaned up.
Touch.
Hold hands. Lean into each other. Kiss. Hug. Rest your head against the person you love.
Ask what feels good. Ask what doesn’t.
Bodies change so much at the end of life. Sometimes touch becomes a way of saying, I know you. I am here.
Let them feel that you are still here.
You don’t have to fill every moment with words. And when none seem good enough or possible, presence is the only thing you might be able to give.
Don’t rush past it.
There will be things you desperately want to look away from. The changes in their body. The changes in your own. The exhaustion. The fear. The awful unfairness of it all.
You don’t have to stare at suffering to prove you love someone.
But you also don’t have to spend every moment trying not to see it.
Loving someone at the end can mean being willing to sit through the parts you wish you weren’t happening.
If it hurts, if it aches like ice in your lungs or a knife in your chest, it’s been. So. F*cking. Good. If it hadn’t been, it wouldn’t hurt so much.
Lean on whatever helps you make meaning of this.
If you believe you’ll meet again, make plans.
If you believe we’re given another life, talk about who you’d like to come back as.
If you don’t believe in any of that, that’s ok, too.
You don’t need to have an answer about what happens after death to know what this person, this connection, has meant to you while you were both here.
If nothing else, “I love you” can be enough.
No word could ever hold all the things we feel in the moments of endings. There’s too much. Too much emotion. Too much thought. Too much uncertainty.
For the ones who are going, your love is what you leave them with. It will never be a substitute for you, whole and present. But your love will comfort them on dark, hard days because love isn’t a solid thing. It’s there, between you now, invisible but palpable. And it will be there when you’re gone because it never leaves.
If you’re the one leaving, you might be afraid.
You might be angry. You might be gutted open by the thoughts of everything you are losing. You may be furious that others get more time.
You don’t have to make peace with it. You don’t have to be brave.
You don’t have to turn your death into a lesson.
You can love the people you love and tell them what you need them to know.
The truth is, we are always powerless over our fate, but when we feel cheated out of the gifts that others have been given, when we feel wholly cheated by the universe itself, the only comfort is your love.
Your love will stay with them.
And if you’re the one staying, you don’t have to be ok, either.
Not for a while.
And even then, an ache may never truly leave.
You will hurt. You may be angry. You may laugh at something and then feel guilty because you laughed, because you had a moment where you forgot to hurt.
That’s grief.
It’s not proof that you’re broken.
It’s evidence that someone mattered deeply to you.
Tell them they are not alone. Tell them they are and always will be the stars in your sky. Tell them your love will reach them, no matter how far they go.
Your love will go with them.
Know that life will go on.
This one cuts deep. But sometimes the truth can do that.
If you are leaving, know that you are truly special.
There will never be another you; you are irreplaceable.
And the you-shaped hole will stay.
The ones you are leaving will be ok. They will ache. They may cry. They may try to numb their pain in ways you wouldn’t want for them.
But they will find their way.
And they will think of you. And miss you. And remember that the reason they ache and cry is that what you gave them, what you were for them, was so very good.
And for you who are staying. You will be ok. You will ache. You may cry.
You may wonder if the sun will ever shine again, not the real sun, of course, but the sun that was your happiness.
You may try to numb your pain in ways that help in the short term, and sometimes that’s ok. But in truth, it’s in the aching that we can remember the love. It’s in the aching that we can remember all that we were gifted by their being.
For you who are staying, it is your right to ache and rage and question.
And it is your purpose to be someone else’s reason for the same one day.
We can never really say goodbye.
No words will be good enough.
We can only love so fiercely when we’re alive that we, too, leave an us-shaped hole in someone’s world.