Wow. What a profoundly felt question. All of it. Yes they live on in your memories. And the photos and things that evoke those memories. And in the sharing of those memories with families and friends. What is so heartbreaking is that the lost one will never do anything NEW. Is frozen in time as a series of snapshots, videos, and scents. Yes I long for their return. No I do not believe I will see them again.

With the living there is something of the same. I am an odd fish however and have kept touch with one of the most important men in my life [whom I refused to marry] and have shared birthday lunches with for many many a year. Others I saw once or twice after we had moved on. It helped make a peace.

But a secret love gone forever? That’s a hard one.

I also grieve for lost pets, especially my baby boy cut off before his time. And oddly enough I find it easier to get behind the “Rainbow Bridge” than heaven. Maybe because there are no gods there.

There’s definitely a difference. If someone is alive there’s always a chance, however, slim that you’ll hear from them again, be it an email, telephone call, or suddenly appearing on your doorstep. When someone is deceased then that’s it.

I’m having a hard time with this right now, in fact.

Firstly, I’m very sorry to hear of your loss.

Unfortunately, I’ve only experienced one death in my lifetime. That was of my father at the age of 16, and I did not know him very well. We lived in completely separate countries, but I carried memories of him from a very young age which made his death very difficult for me. I always had high hopes of meeting him “some day soon”, and not only did that day never come, but I still struggle to this day (I am only 21) with the fact that I will never be able to experience that reunion that I’d been searching for during his time on this earth.

Sometimes it takes me a little while to snap back into reality and remember that it is impossible to see him. If he were still a living person (who I happened to be separated from when I was 5 years, so this ties in with your “separation from a living person” aspect of the question), I would definitely continue to hope and yearn for that possible reunification.

I hope that you do not truly feel as though you are cut off from mourning. There are many different ways that you can express your emotions and while you shouldn’t have to go through that alone, you shouldn’t keep yourself from doing so. My younger brother didn’t know my dad as well as I did at all, and sometimes I felt bad about crying over his death when he could not relate to my feelings as strongly.

That made me want to keep a lot of my feelings of sadness to myself- which I believe in the long run made my grieving process last a lot longer, and it also made me resent my brother for something he could not change.

Truly sorry for your loss. I sympathize very deeply with you today.

I think the yearning to have them back never truly goes away, it only fades over time. Personally, I feel there is nothing that I can do, but remember them fondly and hold them in my heart. That is simply all that there is room for within my own belief system. The memories may slowly fade a bit with time, gather dust, become blurry. The image of their face in your mind will start to melt into something difficult to see without a photo. Remembering how it felt to hug them, hear their voice.. those things will slowly settle into the background of our mind.

The love we hold for them, however, never seems to do that. It lives on as strong as it did in life. That is something powerful in and of itself, I believe.

“What do you do? What if you are cut off from mourning, say because your relationship was secret. What can you do?”
Was this the crux of your question? People need to communicte and interact. The fact that you came to us with this tells me that you need to vent and have feedback about this.
Know that you will probaly always carry feelings of closeness and other things for whomever. And the fact that you need to keep it a secret hinders your processing of the separtion. If the back and forth you get here is not enough, I suggest that you find someone whom you can trust to talk about this with. ANd one session ill not be enough, so hopefuly you can find a friend with whom you can reference this issue at other times in the future.
Getting over someone who has left your life is a process, and there really are no shortcuts. I hope you can find someone with whom you can talk about this with, as it will lessen with time. But time is the bottom line, and articulating helps relegate it to a lesser status in your scheme of things.
Take care.

No.

Of course we will miss the person or pets presence but I do not view death as some horrible thing, it is a natural part of life and while I may feel sadness I also accept it immediatley and prefer to celebrate the good times and not dwell on the loss.

I do not fear my own death nor that of anyone or anything else.

This doesn’t mean I will not feel sadness but it does mean that I have learned and accept that everything is of an impermanent nature, everything…..hold on loosely. ;-)

What a lovely and deeply felt question @wundayatta, I share many of your sentiments and those expressed above. Some things chime more precisely – @anartist‘s ‘baby boy’ brings to mind one of ours, called Pip. He was a cat, full of life and not quite two years when he took one risk too many. We buried him in a tee shirt with ‘no fear’ on the front; as he had none (his downfall).

Also, a (hmmm, should I be admitting this here?!) lover… Whom I shall never see again, and often wonder about. He was lovely, our time was very short and sweet, he was going blind… So will never see me again whatever happens.

Do you write creatively or make things at all? The way I am finding it possible to feel Pip’s life continuing is in story. He takes the form of a young boy, who has adventures as Pip clearly did (voles were big in his life). My blind friend has also appeared in a story, which makes me smile. It is as yet unpublished, but when it is I shall dedicate it to him, using only his first name. He might just read it one day…

The second law of thermodynamics suggests that energy never can be destroyed. Life is energy and although when someone dies they cease to exist in person, the energy of their life can still be felt and loved. The worst form of ‘death’ is perhaps to be forgotten or ignored…

For those we may never see again (the strangest things do happen), send love; think of them with unconditional love – it will reach them and you will feel the better for it. For those who have gone forever, remembering and honouring the memory is a way of keeping their lifetime precious, that keeps us feeling that life is precious too. I reckon anyway.

forgot to say, love affair with blind man was very, very secret!

I’m sorry for your loss. I know how you feel—I’m getting dressed getting ready to go to my sister’s funeral.

@choppersangel what a sweet wonderful Pip. Brave and foolhardy like my Jacky, and what a wonderful way to bury him. Jacky’s was more traditional
Pip is a great name too. Did you know there was a “Pip” in one of the Oz stories?

all teary now, going to cook dinner, big love to all
Apologies to @wundayatta, no right to hijack these responses for personal emotion, but @anartist touched a string… All good no doubt!

Seven years ago (seven years ago this week, as a matter of fact) my father died unexpectedly from an accident at home. Since he was my mother’s primary caretaker, and in fact he was the only reason she hadn’t been committed to a nursing home long before, the family put her into care the week after Dad’s death. I decided to visit her that week to help her acclimate, since I could ‘borrow’ some future vacation time from my very understanding boss.

So I took the week off to fly to Arizona, live in their rented home there and visit her every day at the nursing home. I took her on long drives through the country, watched Jeopardy and ‘Wheel’ every night the way she liked to, and she insisted that I do the crossword puzzles in the paper every day because she liked the way I would only do them in ink—and said our goodbyes. I knew that I wouldn’t be seeing her alive again, because I wouldn’t have another opportunity to fly across country, and I knew that she wouldn’t live for very long without Dad. Though her Alzheimer’s was pretty advanced at the time (she was ‘lucky’; she had a form of dementia that allowed her to remember her family, but she forgot simple things in her life, such as the words to describe various common things), I’m sure she knew that we’d never meet again.

Six months later she broke her hip getting out of bed, and died the following week, with one of my sisters in attendance.

Your question is deeply thought-provoking, @wundayatta.

I am sorry for your loss and the grief you will endure as you internalize the death of your friend. There will be happy moments, though, and times you’ll laugh out loud at a memory that surfaces unexpectedly.

I’m really churning with your final question regarding a “secret” relationship and how to deal with the grief when you might not be able to express it publicly. I fear I’m in such a relationship where the depths of my feelings for another (not mutual, BTW—so there really isn’t “an affair”) actually have me preoccupied with the thoughts of how I’d handle that person’s serious illness and death. And I can’t come to terms with it—really. My hope is that my feelings will abate over time well ahead of any ill-fate that befalls him. That’s my hope.

Sorry about your friend.

I have lost a few family members and friends unexpectedly. From those experiences I learned that you never know when someone you are acquainted with will suddenly kick the bucket. For this reason, you should treat every encounter as your last. Of course, I don’t mean this in a morbid sort of way. I just mean that you should not leave unresolved issues hanging.

My family always makes a point to say “I Love You” when we go our separate ways for the day. That way, should one of us get hit by a truck or something those will be the last words we remember exchanging with them. Ok, I know it sounds cheezy, but it beats the heck out of the prospect of remembering your last exchange of words as something annoying.

i miss my doggy, does that count?

Sorry to hear about what you are going through right now.
Not only with the recent funeral, but also with the anguish of wonder over a relationship from the past.

As to the question of what you do if you know you will never see them again, I think you have to find a way to say goodbye. If you are lucky, you get a chance to speak to them before they go. I know that i will always remember my last conversation with my grandmother shortly before she passed. I actually encouraged her to let go because her mind was fighting to stay present while her body was telling her that it was ready to let go. I encouraged her to stop thinking about the next visit from family and to just let her spirit release and move on.

Sometimes you don’t get the chance to say anything, or if it is the case of not seeing someone who is still alive, you may spend time regretting the last things spoken. It is hard to let go of hurtful words and even harder to let go of fantasies of how things might be different if you did see them again.

But you really have to try to stay focused on the present in those cases, because often it isn’t the same even if you do reconnect. There’s nothing wrong with holding on to good memories unless they get in the way of you being able to go on with your life and embrace what is in front of you. Your life is about where you are right now.

This is so sad and I’m sorry. It made me remember when my daughter came with me to see her grandfather in the nursing home. He wasn’t doing well. When we left , she handed me the car keys and said, “here; you drive. I’ll never see him again.” And she didn’t. It’s a part of life, this dying thing. What is it for? To make our days here more valuable to us? I just don’t know.

I’m still figuring this out. Sorry for your loss @wundayatta and @Rarebear .

@fireside

Exactly right!

Most peoples suffering comes from clinging to the past which is gone forever, and in doing so miss out on the present moment reality of their lives.

Die to the past in every moment is a great mantra, sadly one that most never are able to put into practice.

I don’t recommend my answer for everyone but in my situation it resulted in a couple of bottles of merlot consumed followed by totally naked wailing on the bathroom floor where I subsequently slept for 12 hours afterwards. I did feel much better afterwards but I will never be able to live down that my teenage children saw me in that state (never before or after as I rarely drink). And of course they like to bring the episode up at larger family dinners. So no I don’t recommend that course of action.
Give yourself downtime to grieve. Schedule it. At first it may consume whole days but schedule less and less time each day. At the end of the time pack up your memories and then find something distracting to do. Creative pursuits help alot in my opinion and so does nature. Be good to your body…so eat right, sleep (without a reliance on meds or alcohol).
Exercise and get out into some kind of activity around other people even if you don’t stay long.

My heart goes out to you friend. Eventually, time softens the loss of a loved one, and thankfully it rarely goes away…it just morphs into the fond memories. The pain becomes more of a dull ache that occasionally crops up, like an old injury in cold weather.

Yes, I think that there is a difference in losing someone to death and losing track of someone who is still alive. When someone passes away, it is permanent. In an ironic twist, it can be harder and easier to deal with at the same time. We lost both Dad and a sister to cancer. I so wish they were still here to be with us and meet the new family members. Both were mentors to many, and while they are gone, they still play that role for those that they touched.

It can be easier as we know the ending to their tale. My best friend from grade school is MIA. I’ve searched for her and have had no luck. Not knowing if she is alive and happy or is no longer living is something that crossed my mind regularly.

I don’t think we will see our loved ones again in an afterlife, so I don’t give it much thought. Oddly though, there are times when I’ve thought, “I sure hope Dad didn’t see that idiotic blunder I just made.” I do dream about them regularly though. They aren’t necessarily good or bad dreams…they are just there. I like that.

As for mourning someone when the relationship was a secret, I don’t know. The closest I’ve come to that is when a friend on another online social site suddenly disappeared. Fortunately, another friend had enough personal information about Dean that she was able to locate an obituary for him in his local paper. The friend considered driving up for the funeral and decided against it, as it might be construed as a bit creepy if she were asked how she knew Dean. We all paid our tributes to Dean on the website, which was a small comfort. A few months later, I was going to be passing by the friend’s house, so I got in touch with her. We spent a couple of hours drinking coffee at her kitchen table and talking about Dean and our real lives. It was a comforting afternoon with a few tears shed. We don’t regret it.

The first year of losing a loved one is the hardest. How many times did I reach out for the phone to call them before realizing that no one will answer? Anniversaries and holidays are tough. Please take the advice of the other Jellies and find something to take your mind off of it, as well as write. You write beautifully, and it seems obvious by your posts that you put a lot of effort and thought into it.

I don’t think I do anything, other than feel overwhelmingly sad for awhile, then gradually, over time, get used to it.

There is nothing to do but keep breathing, keep getting out of bed in the morning, keep putting one foot in front of the other. Time helps, but reality is forever changed.

Sorry for your loss.

Do you think there’s a difference between these two types of never seeing someone again—via death or via an utterly complete separation with a person who is still alive?

Yes and no. Sometimes it’s hard to make a distinction between a death and some kind of falling out with someone, because even though you know the person is still alive, it does feel like you’re mourning a death – because you are, in a way. Things become different. The heaviness of the finality of the relationship looms over you. But in this case, sometimes it can be worse than a death, because the fact that they remain alive often gives people a kind of sustained hope. ”Maybe, somehow, we’ll talk again.” In death, on the other hand, you know it’s over and there’s no chance for things to go back to before – so you either deal with it the best you can, or you fuck your life up, or you believe that you will, in one way or another, see the person again.

Do you always hope, in the back of your mind, for some reconciliation with a living person?

If you’re anything like me emotionally, and from observing you here for a while, I think we are somewhat similar… Yes. It feels wrong, sometimes, because in my case, I’m part of the reason I will never get the chance to do that. Feeling like I want to be given some kind of chance to explain – to make clear as much as possible the circumstances – makes me feel horribly guilty, though. As it should. I hurt the person, badly, and I don’t deserve it, as much as I want it. I have to believe that the other person was able to become a stronger person because of my fuck-up, and that they don’t dwell on what was lost like I do. And that’s just it – I dwell so much because I know the power of what was there. I know how much it had to hurt them. It’s hard for me to get over, and I don’t think I ever will – even when (hopefully) the person has moved completely beyond what happened and becomes a happy person.

Do you hope for some kind of reunification with someone who is dead? If so, is that a reflection of a wish, against impossible odds, to see this person again, or do you really expect to see them?

Heh. This part of the question is hard for me to answer. When Tigh died, I talked to him all the time, as if he could hear me. I wrote letters to him, as if I had somewhere to send them and as if he could read them. I still do. In those moments, it feels good to pretend that he knows… But it’s when I’m done, when I stop writing or directing my thoughts “to” him, that reality hits me in the face like a fucking brick wall. And it’s really weird, because I’ve had what I’ve considered “ghostly” experiences at different times in my life – powerful ones. Whatever they were, they genuinely made me wonder about what else might be out there. After Tigh was gone, though, I stepped back and stopped wondering so much, started thinking that my experiences, despite how crazy they were, must have been something else. “Because if ghosts are real”, I thought, “Tigh would have been here already.” Somewhere in the back of my mind, I hope that I can see him again someday. I know that it probably won’t happen, but I can’t stop hoping that me and a lot of other people are wrong. He was my best friend, we were so extremely close, I don’t wanna let that go completely. This is why it’s so hard for me – I have not and never will convince myself that I’ll see him again. But at the same time, I can’t say for sure, because I just don’t know. An agnostics dilemma, sitting on the fence, waiting in agony for proof either way.

What do you do? What if you are cut off from mourning, say because your relationship was secret. What can you do?

You mourn anyway. Not a lot of people knew how close me and Tigh were, and that was extremely painful for me. The agony I felt, I didn’t feel that I could show openly, if only because people would wonder why I was feeling it. Nothing about our friendship was a secret – it was simply that neither one of us ever detailed to others exactly how close we were. It was the kind of closeness that is beyond words, and only the two people involved will truly understand. So when I didn’t feel that I could mourn around others – and I don’t like to anyway – I did it alone. I would walk somewhere, or seclude myself away from people, and wail like I myself was dying.

If this is what you need to do, do it. Do not hold it in, because your pain will increase tremendously – and you will damage yourself for later on in life. Realize that no matter what, nothing will ever go back to how it was before, you will never see them again… And cry about it. Mourn it, as long as you have to – even if it’s for the rest of your life – because it’s horrifyingly sad realizing that love that powerful does end. It does end, and that’s exactly why it’s so sad. It’s just a fact about this fucked up little thing we call life. The more passionate you are about life, the harder it will be when something like this happens. I know what it’s like, I feel for you, and I’m very sorry. It might not ever get completely better – but that’s okay. You’re mourning something beautiful and wonderful that disappeared from life – whether through death or distance, or both.

I’m not sure it ever gets completely better, friend. And in my own way, I don’t know if I want it to for me. A lifetime of mourning seems about right for the amount of love that I’m too aware went missing.

I’m back from the funeral and I’m just sitting around, so I popped online. In answer to the question, I don’t actually fear death myself too much. What I fear, though, is that I’m going to get to the age where more people are dying around me than being born. I’m already sort of there—I’m 46. All of my friends have had their kids and now I find myself going to more funerals.