You have made it this far, and you are going to make it, and you are making it, and that has got to make you know how brave and strong and carried you truly are.

It’s strange how loss can feel like the very heaviest thing of all to carry.

I know, it’s felt impossible on so many days — too many days — in so many ways.

I never get over it, and how it feels: It’s strange how loss can feel like the very heaviest thing of all to carry.

Unbidden memories can come flooding back at the most unexpected moments— sometimes it’s just a few notes of an old song, or a particular phrase tossed out in a certain way or just that time of year and the way the world spins on its axis — and, in an instant, you ache to be right back there, turn back the hands of time, write a different story with your fingertip there in the sands of time, and get a do-over before it’s all over.

Why does your mind strangely still think for one startling split second that you can still call them, hear their voice one more time, that you can still turn around and walk right back into your glorious life as it really once was?  

I don’t pretend to know the purpose of why it all happened the way it did.

And you may never know why it all happened, the way it all happened, but you have to know that none of this marks your end, or the end.  Though, frankly, there have been more moments than you can count when you’ve silently wished that somehow the world would just quietly fold up shop and everything would just end, because the courage to keep on going on is beyond exhausting.

And yet: Though there has been a shattering end to what was, but there can never be an end to the love.

“Though there has been a shattering end to what was, but there can never be an end to the love. No death can ever slay love.  When someone lives on in our memory, in tender ways, they still live on and never die.“

The love that was, it will always be, and it will always go on, and that love can’t be snuffed out or erased or dismissed or belittled or made small because love is always the greatest of all and can never be stopped at all.

No death can ever slay love.  When someone lives on in our memory, in tender ways, they still live on and never die.

And the love you knew — it has no known end. That long ago love that was, it can still come, and hold you long now, hold you for forever now. Let all that love tenderly hold you while you just let all that you feel and remember come.

Right here, right now: You get to mark the anniversary of the hard, because you lived mark every single day. Everything’s changed now, because you’re changed now, and time doesn’t heal all wounds, but time often only deepens the wound, because you come face to face with the reality that that no matter how much time passes, this loss will never pass, this loss will never end, this loss is permanent, this loss is with you always, till your own story ends.

The permanence of your loss can make it permanently painful to breathe.

And, in so many tender ways, the loss only expands, deepens, widens over time, because as you step into new moments — a family celebration, a graduation, a wedding, another spring of daffodils nodding in the wind — the ache compounds, because here is yet another place you meet the grief  and loss face to face. You are now here, and they still aren’t anywhere, and loss can grow so large and loud.  You may keep moving forward, but loss is always your companion now.  The love never ends, but neither does the grief ever end.

How in the hurting world do you learn to live in new ways when so much of you longs to go back to the before-days?

Turns out:  When you have to learn to live with loss, you become a life-long learner. Living with loss is a form of learning. Living with wounds and loss leaves you relearning a whole new broken world. How do you learn a new way of being when the loss has changed so much of your life’s meaning?

“Deep grief may be deeply complex, but the deep bonds of love continue for always.“

You may feel like you’ve lost part of yourself, because, in part, your brain’s literally rewiring parts of itself to navigate a world that no longer includes that story, that person, that life.   And because you feel like you’ve lost a part of yourself — you’re having to find the bruised new you now are.

Every loss means a loss of self — and a birthing of new scarred and marked self.

Who are you when you are no longer their daughter, their son, their mother, their father, that person, anymore, and never will be again?

But the deepest true is that nothing can break the heart bonds between them and you. You never leave the heart of the people you love behind; their love and all the memories will be with you always. Deep grief may be deeply complex, but the deep bonds of love continue for always.

I think of that when I think of how the Jewish community has a tradition called yahrzeit,  that literally translates  “time of year” and  “is a  Yiddish  word meaning anniversary of a death” — and there are all kinds of deaths, of hopes and dreams and relationship and people we desperately love, and that time of year comes begging for a marking.

A great life is like a brief candle — it gives all of itself, to give all kinds of others warmth and light to keep going on.

And when that time of year comes every year, to mark that hard anniversary, like the Jewish community, you could mark the “yahrzeit,” as they do, by lighting a candle at sundown, lighting warming love just as the long dark night begins, and let the flame burn on for a full 24 hours.  

In the weight of loss, lighting a candle of memory, can lighten the soul.

And as you live with that yahrzeit flame for a complete day, as the earth makes one full rotation around the sun, you could feel the brightening epiphany of it too from the holy Book, there in Proverbs 20:27, “The spirit of man is the candle of the LORD…”

In the face of great loss and grief, there it is the epiphany:

A great life is like a brief candle — it gives all of itself, to give all kinds of others warmth and light to keep going on.  

During the anniversary of the hard, you could take a bit of time with that dancing candle yahrzeit’s flame and pick up a pen and write down even just one remembrance that warms your hurting heart. You could mark up a page with how you’ve been marked and changed by grief and loss and love and life.  

Making space for memories makes space for love to come and carry you through.  

“When you take the time to remember whoever and whatever you’ve loved and lost, what you are actually doing is letting your broken heart be re-membered and mended.“

When you take the time to remember whoever and whatever you’ve loved and lost, what you are actually doing is letting your broken heart be re-membered and mended.

On the anniversary of the hard, you could also let your life that was, before the loss, or their life, before they left, be a light as you mark the anniversary by  giving to a cause, to honour that light by lighting countless other flames: an organization, a charity, a flaming work in a dark world, that would be a contagious blaze of igniting love. Supporting a cause in someone’s memory can be a way to let the light of their love and life still support you.

Even now, loss can have a legacy of light.  

As the yahrzeit candle burns low across 24 hours, after you’ve done some writing to remember and re-member, after you’ve passed on light into the world by supporting a cause, you could close the marking of the hard anniversary by holding a plate of food that holds all kinds of memories, by sharing some food that takes you right back to a memory that you hold dear, so you can feel dearly held: a big slice of apple pie with a bit of cheddar cheese, his absolute favourite on an autumn evening, or butterscotch ice cream with strawberry sauce, like you used to have all together around the table on Sunday summer afternoons before life as you knew it ended.

Even in this season, when you’ve tasted too long the burning saltiness of hidden tears,  when your whole body, that holds all this trauma, has wearied from having to keep standing and withstanding all this loss, even now you could reach down and hold your broken heart close, so it might drink down rich memories from a bottomless cup of love.

“Even now, loss can have a legacy of light.“

And that drink could burn in your belly, those memories could kindle your whole being into flame…. so long after your memorial yahrzeit candle burns out, you feel how you have enough love to make it all the way through the dark, warmed by a light that softens all the hardest things into a brave and tender hope.