If only that was true; what happens then is that we part from one another, either by choice or by fate or by death. People move on, and everyone says time is the solution for every sorrow, that you will heal; just give it a while. If one of us is clinging to the memories and other person is embracing life and moving on, how would you measure their love? Who loved the lost one more?
Whenever one gets some solitude, why do all those memories keep whirling back? Imagine an evening when no one is home; it's cloudy outside and you are just sitting at your windowpane looking at the stormy clouds gathering in the sky. In no time your mind starts reflecting that storm inside, and all those memories start surfacing up. Maybe it was that silly fight you had with your classmate or the prank against the teacher in which you got caught or a secret that you kept from parents about bunking school and going for a movie. It just keeps coming up that maybe we should have shared it, or expressed our unsaid feelings. Then after many years we may gather the courage to pick up the phone, or write that email, or send that message, to make amends with our parents, lost friends or even first unexpressed love.
What would one do if she/he loses someone close to the heart forever, and if there is no second chance? How debilitated would a person be at that time? The world seems to pause for that moment, and everything seems trifling. It feels like taking that next breath is a sin. How does it feel for a woman to attend a baby shower after having an early miscarriage? And people expect her to move on, telling her to find happiness somewhere else!
Many times, we console ourselves saying that time is the only solution. We even try to fool ourselves with the age old saying that time can heal everything! It seems possible that one day one could wake up with no memories from past and could go on enjoying breakfast on the same table, ignoring that empty chair. Maybe the house could be filled with the aroma of Christmas cookies again. Life must move on, right? Or does that mean that their seemingly unmeasurable love died with them as well?
Every spring when new life is quivering out of the earth, one tends to wonder how their loved one would have loved working in her garden waiting for the blooming flowers, or where she would have planned to go for summer vacation. What could I have given him on this Father’s Day? What would have made him smile? Would she have approved of my boyfriend? If she were alive, she would have gone to the prom this year.
Do such thoughts just stop coming to us after a while when one loses his/her mother, father, son, daughter, friend, or neighbor? No, we carry them in our minds forever. While enjoying a lost loved one’s favorite dessert, or when a whiff of their favorite perfume passes by, or … simply when we go on living. Yes, we do drag our baggage everywhere. There is no escape from it. No social gathering seems complete without our lost loved ones. When we see complete families, our family's incompleteness becomes even more prevalent. We just bite our lips, put on a smile and show others that we are fine. We pretend that time has worked its magic, and that everyone that is lost is forgotten!
But maybe we are secretly just saying, “I will keep loving you forever, all the way to the moon and back…”
