“Out of ordinariness, the unbearable arrives.”

I received a series of texts from a dear friend, arriving amidst the ordinariness of my day. “Send some prayers.” “My sister is on life support.” “My sister passed away at 3PM.” Out of ordinariness, the unbearable arrives. I know this in my heart and in my soul and in my body from my own experience. And now, it is she, who will awake this morning, emerging from forgetfulness, to remember.

Nothing is the same, and everything is the same; it’s the same now cloaked in loss. In the beginning loss can leave us feeling so completely alone. Alone to face the days ahead without a sister, a mother, a father, a partner, a child, a friend. Deep in this aloneness, this all-encompassing sense of loss, there lives a gift, if we can bear to seek it. It is the fullness of our loved ones being, all of it, brought into sharp focus, available in a way not possible when they still lived.

Living is busy, complicated, the mundane interspersed with the exciting. Those we love come in and out of focus as we move through our days and nights; snippets of communication, planned and unplanned encounters, updates from all kinds of sources, near and far. All this life with another filled with laughter and tears, frustration and fun, impatience and kindness, criticism and support, knowing and unknowing. And we build a relationship, doing the best we can, and so do they.

And then, in the instant of loss, all of it, every single bit of it, the routine and the wonderful, is felt deeply and cherished and held dear. The whole of the person stands before us, and we miss all of it, and we love all of it. And we feel alone for the loss of it.

I believe that in that moment we are given a grace, the grace of remembering: all of it. And in the remembering, we are able to connect more profoundly than before, with all of it, with the whole of the person now gone. And that connection will never die. It will grow, and we will find comfort in it as the days unfold without their physical presence.

It is true that everything has changed, that loss requires us to move through our days carrying a heart just a little more broken. But we are not alone, for it is in our brokenness that we are brought together in love, making our losses more bearable as we walk together in the ordinariness of our days, laughing and crying, falling and getting up, criticizing and comforting, living and dying.