You don’t always get to choose how people leave your life in finality.
Sometimes they die; sometimes they’re toxic, or thieves, or liars, and you decide to cut ties with them; sometimes they move away, and all you can do is hope that their life will be better for it, even if it’s difficult to fill the void they leave behind.
And with the end of any relationship comes a wound within you. It is said that no one is truly gone, so long as they exist in your thoughts and memories, but their absence is a hot brand pressed against those experiences; it reshapes them and leaves undeniable scars that are very much a part of you. Those scars will change you, maybe for the worse at first, but every time you climb out of a hole you get better at climbing out of holes. That is to say that education — in this case the experience of coping with grief — will prepare you for your future. Even if you’re fortunate enough to live a life scarce of grief, your experiences can be used to enlighten your interactions with others. Empathy is a powerful tool when caring for someone, and to teach someone how to climb out of a hole is one of the greatest honors that life can provide you.
And then there’s that dreaded void that I mentioned earlier.
Maybe it’s not so much a hole that is left behind as if they’ve been physically ripped from you as it is a vacancy that you had reserved for them — for the knowledge of who they are or were; for the insights that they shared with you that changed your perception of the others or of yourself — an ever-expanding space for the ever-growing love for everything that they have been and could be.
But once they’re gone that growth stops like a car hitting a wall. There’s no time to acclimate to their absence — no gradual slowing of the growth to stagnation. And suddenly that space you’ve dedicated to them seems bottomless.
But it can be repartitioned. The battered edges of the old love will always remain, imperfect and ugly, but that space that it was filling still yearns to be filled. I know that it might feel like a betrayal to permit someone else to fill that space, but nobody wins if part of you is left empty.
Love is a skill; it comes more naturally to some than to others, but by all it can be learned. To reject the love that someone offers you, or to deny yourself the love that you could have for someone, is to refuse an education; an education that is necessary to care for those who you want nothing but the best for. Not everyone will learn to climb out of holes the same way, and it’s important to be adaptable to the needs of others.
So exercise your love; flex its muscles and push it to the point of discomfort. Practice, practice, practice, so that loving someone is second-nature. Because believe me: a failure to adequately express your love for someone before the space you had designated to them has to be filled by someone else will be one of the biggest regrets of your life.
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Melancholy's Bane 