When you imagine someone close to you dying, or at least when I would imagine it, I always thought I would never move on from it. I always imagined I would either die or I would be stuck in this sad sad place of depression and never be able to go on with my life like normal. You think it would stop everything. But it doesn't. You cry yourself to sleep that night and maybe cry yourself out. And then you sleep because it's night time and you're tired and you wake up because it's a new day and the world didn't stop... Only yours did. And slowly days pass and weeks pass until it's been months or years and you know what you come to realize? We survive. We find this supernatural strength inside us to cook dinner and laugh at cute babies and put up the Christmas decorations and get back to real life. One day you'll look up and it'll be closing in on two years... One day it'll be ten, without someone or something that you thought would end you if you lost it.
Last month we lost a boy from my hometown just shy of his 24th birthday. The other day a girl I've known almost my whole life lost her sister... People always ask my perspective on these things.
My heart is broken that I'll never see Jake's smiling face again on Eve's Eve and that his poor family has lost whom I can only imagine was a ray of sunshine in their lives.
I am devastated for the Whitelaw family but for Nicole in particular because I know the indescribable feeling of losing a sister.
Those families will never be the same. You can't imagine what it does to a family to lose part of the glue holding them together. But my perspective on it is that we will all be okay. We survive because the world doesn't stop. Your world will stop and you won't be okay, but one day, you will. We survive because they would want us to. We survive to live the lives they didn't get to. We survive because they are watching over us. We survive because one day, when we get to Heaven, they will be there to greet us and it will be that much sweeter. We survive.
