Carrying The Weight Of Past Heartaches

We all carry things from our past with us. Life moves on, the world flows around us and we eventually fall into step with the pace of life. Those heartaches get buried under the other hurts. Our pain blends into the other experiences of life.

Society expects you to quickly process your grief without dwelling on complex emotions.Family and friends have their own lives and those take precedence in their minds. Years go by, the hurt doesn’t go away, it just changes as you live with it. Deep loss is not something you ever get past, it becomes part of who you are and how you see the world.

In the fast-paced world, people are often expected to move on after a deep loss. You are expected to quickly process their grief without getting caught up in complicated emotions. Spending too much time in a mournful state is frowned upon and grieving people are pressured to put on a smile and bury their grief under a socially acceptable facade. This often leads to repressed grief which can lead to complex grief.

“The loss of a friend is like that of a limb; time may heal the anguish of the wound, but the loss cannot be repaired.” Robert Southey

I have a weird fascination with reading obituaries. There always seem to be interesting facts you can learn about a person by reading their obituary. Survivors and those who preceded them in death often contain family you might have forgotten. You might have forgotten their multiple stillbirths, infant deaths, and the loss of other children due to accidents or illness. An obituary can tell you so much about the deceased and their family and how they feel about them. Loved ones often express their love and heartbreak in the obituary they write. For some, it is important to write an elaborate, flourish, and embellish their loved one’s obituary. Every detail of the life must be noted Long, elaborate eulogies often indicate a family expressing guilt over having not spent enough time with their loved one.

"A funeral eulogy is a belated plea for the defense delivered after the evidence is all in.”

Irvin S. Cobb

Everyone has a story to their lives. We all have good and bad experiences. Some people are better at concealing their heartaches. They suffer in silence, keeping the pain to themselves. In the chaos of daily life, we can forget how someone close to us might be grieving a long-ago loss which took a piece of their soul. Just because people don’t talk about it doesn’t mean someone has ceased to grieve the loss of a beloved sibling or child. the people around them move on as their lives were not deeply impacted and the loss is easy to move past. Grief can often feel like having broken ribs, you look fine on the outside but every breath is taken with pain. We don’t get past a loss simply because we move forward in life. Many years later, the loss can resurface without warning.

At the end of our lives, we are a collection of our experiences and losses suffered early in life remain with us until the end. Sometimes, death is the release we need to rejoin a precious loved one was have yearned for since they left us. We never have enough time to make memories with those we love, but some were taken from us far too soon. They have been in our minds and memories with every milestone and major event. We miss them and our hearts ache to be with them again. Some people who lost a loved one early has to live their whole lives with a hurting heart.