Why did we love in silence?
I’ve known loss at a very young age and I know exactly how it feels to love someone so much and not be able to tell them words like “I love you” or “I like being with you”
A while ago I found a video of a girl reading a poem about how powerful it is to be loved by someone who knows grief. She said people who know loss know more about love since they have this constant reminder that anyone they have in their lives will someday be gone. So they try to remember little things about the people they love, they try to make sure the people they love know that they love them.
You see, grief is like a disease with no cure. It changes your life irreversibly. Once you know about grief, you will never forget it. You will never forget the feeling of mourning for it stays with you — always.
You can’t get rid of that feeling, no matter how much you want to. You just have to figure out how to live with it. You have to learn how to accept their ghosts as part of your life. When I say “ghosts”, I don’t mean actual ghosts — I don’t think they exist at some point. What I meant by “ghosts” is memories. Their bodies might not be there with you but the memories you shared with them will somehow always be there in your head. Even if they come in the form of torn papers — or puzzle pieces, or random clips. And they’ll be played over and over like a broken movie tape when you are longing for their existence.
I’ve known grief since I was very young. I lost my dad to a heart attack at the age of 7. Hell, I wasn’t even 7 at that time. My father passed away on March 7, 2008. My birthday was in May. So technically I was still 6 when he was gone. A very young age, wasn’t it?
I barely knew anything about how the world works. I had no chance to know my father as an adult and I barely have any memory of him left in my head. At that time, I wasn’t even familiar with the concept of death, and my dear father had to leave this world way too soon than I imagined.
About a year after my father died, my grandfather followed. He was my mother’s father and I had a pretty good relationship with him. I never knew my mother’s mother because she died before I was even an embryo. I just got to know her from the pictures my mother showed me and the stories she told me. Knowing her like that feels weird at some point. Because it feels like she never actually existed. It feels like my mother was telling me about some fictional character from a book she used to read when she was 10.
When I was a little older, my father’s father also died. I never really had a good relationship with him because I was never really close with my father’s side of the family. I never really feel comfortable being around them. I don’t think I have any good memory of him. Even if I do, I don’t expect to remember it at all. I remember I wasn’t even that sad when I knew that he passed away. I saw his body lying still on the floor, a piece of cloth was covering his whole body from head to toe. I shed a tear, but I wasn’t really sad. I felt numb.
Now that I’m remembering it, it makes me think, was it because I didn’t have a good relationship with him when he was alive, or was it because I was faced with such pain over and over again so it didn’t surprise me anymore?
I was very young when I lost three men in my life. Ever since that time, there haven’t been many men left in my life. All I had left was my older brother and my cousin. So now that I’m an adult, I don’t know how to act when men are around. I feel awkward. I hate to be around men because I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to them or how I should behave.
I didn’t realize until recently that losing a father figure has affected me in a way I never imagined. I thought I was fine. I thought this had always been the inevitable plan and I should just simply get on with it. And I never really realized until growing up, that someone who’s experienced loss and grief tends to love so much. Because I do. I do love someone so much most of the time and I don’t even know why. I just know I do. And even though I have all the love in me to give, it’s hard for me to actually show it to the people I love. Just recently I realized that I don’t tell them enough that I love them, I don’t hug them enough, and I’m not there with them enough.
I’ve known loss at a very young age and I know exactly how it feels to love someone so much and not be able to tell them words like "I love you" or "I like being with you". I know that feeling of longing for a hug from someone impossible for you to meet again in this world. It’s such a constant pain. It’s like an open wound that will never be healed and you just know that it’ll always be there.
People in my life have been acting like it’s okay to hide their feelings, to bottle them up. But it’s actually not okay. We aren't supposed to hide our feelings. We aren’t supposed to hold back our emotions. We weren’t born that way. We weren’t meant to be such an emotionless creature. And I think that is what makes us different from any other creatures God created. Because we feel something. We have the ability to love, to give love, to show love, to share love, to receive love.
People in my life, they’ve been loving in silence, they’ve been caring in silence but I’m so sick of that. I am so sick and tired of loving in silence, of caring in silence. I am so sick of pretending like I don’t care when in reality I do. I want to tell them that I love them. I want to hug them, kiss them, hold their hands. I want to show them that I am here if they ever need company and I care about them so much. I wish they let me love them out loud because I don’t want to have to look back someday and think to myself, I should’ve done that when they were here.
