Death isn’t forever. Our loved ones live on

People die once. Then they die over and over again in a thousand ways. But they also live on over and over again. In your favourite memories. In the silly things they used to do. In the stories you tell about them.

My friend and colleague suffered a death in the family recently. It was sudden, unexpected, and incredibly sad. It still is.

As these things often do, it left a number of us who know her feeling deeply sad for her and the family, and lost as to what to do. We were on the outside looking in, wanting to help but struggling to cross the incredible gulf that seems to open up all around when someone close to you dies.

That’s the thing about grief and loss — it can be so isolating. Unless you’re the one who has suffered the loss it can be difficult to enter into that pain in a sensitive and helpful way. That isolation is difficult to process on top of the world of grief you’re already in. People say and do stupid things they don’t mean, mostly because they don’t know how to reach across that chasm of pain.

Even when you’re in a group of friends or family who have lost someone it can be lonely.

Nobody loses the same person. Our relationships are such that no two people ever suffer the same loss — the person gone always means different things to each person left to grieve their passing.

They could be drinking buddy and storyteller to one, confidante and adviser to another, and mother or father figure to another. They might be your friend, but they’re someone else’s brother or son.

No grief is exactly the same because nobody loses the same person. And you don’t just lose them all at once. You lose them a thousand times.

There’s the initial sucker punch that comes with the news — that feeling like you’ve just had your insides ripped out while you’re awake. You’re left to walk around in a world that is going about its business while everything inside you screams, “Can’t you feel it? Don’t you understand? Nothing will ever be OK again!’

But as time goes on and that initial pain begins to subside you begin to lose them in different ways. Sometimes it’s the tiniest thing you remember about them and it makes you ache a little. Other times it hits you like a wave and knocks your feet out.

My grandpa died a few years back from leukaemia. He was in his eighties and died with his loving family around him. But we didn’t just lose him that day in April.

My dad lost him again a few months later when he picked up his phone one morning to call grandpa out of habit and realised he wasn’t there to talk to.

We lost him when my grandma moved into a retirement community and we had to sell the house he had built from scratch with his bare hands.

I lose him over and over as my sons grow, knowing how much he would have loved their laughs, their mischief and curiosity. Even writing about him feels like losing him again.

People die once. Then they die over and over again in a thousand ways.

But they also live on over and over again.

In your favourite memories. In the silly things they used to do. In the stories you tell about them and in the advice they gave.

My grandpa lives on in his love of learning. He spent his working life in the meat works, but I know he would have made a brilliant and passionate school teacher. He knew something about just about everything; even in his eighties he was passionate about history and plants and animals, always wanting to know more about the world in which he lived. His natural curiosity is something I desperately want my boys to embrace.

He lives every time my father, brother or I drive by the waterfront at Moreton Bay and the swell and breeze are up — the “white horses running in the bay” as the small waves crest and spray. He lives in the small sail boat my brother built, “White Horses” painted on the stern.

He lives every time I see his tenon saw hanging in my shed. A saw he used decades ago to build the family home where we spent so many Christmas and Easter lunches, eating too much and laughing.

He is gone, but he lives.

King Solomon said that everything has its time — even life and death, and the happiness and grief they both bring. It is the human experience. May we be the kind of people who live more than we die, even after we’re gone.