The root of the retort

Photo by Luis Santoyo on Unsplash

You know when little kids spout off “but that’s not fair!” and the parent goes “Well, life’s not fair!”

I have been thinking about that lately because I have a little inner-conflict with my feelings of “not fairness” sometimes.

For example—

I hear about someone who is (older) middle-aged like 50’s or a senior who has lost their parent (or a grandparent) and they are distraught.

Part of me, obviously has sympathies and all the empathy for them—

After all, those are hard losses.

But—

They are also age appropriate.

They also may be 20-30 years older than I am and only now losing their parents or their grandparents.

I have enough heart and compassion that I do care—

But, but—

There’s also a tiny part of me that in the back of my head, or under my breath, I want to mumble—

Lucky.

You didn’t have two suicides and lose your entire nuclear family in less than five years, while in your early to mid thirties.

Now, I KNOW that—

Many people lose their parents much younger than that.

They can’t help it.

It always, always sucks, no matter what.

I know all of that.

And please don’t misunderstand me, I do get that life simply isn’t fair and we can’t choose when we lose our family members and those most important to us.

And this isn’t meant to be an entire bitch fest.

Truly.

Part of it is to acknowledge my losses.

I know it seems I have, but I also spent a lot of time repressing my family members’ active and passive suicides because they were so ill and dysfunctional. I couldn’t feel all that I wanted to feel about their deaths and was supposed to feel about them because—

It seemed cruel. They were already so sick and messed up.

But in doing so, I also short-changed myself the full range of emotions that I was allowed to feel.

After all, I’m the only one left living to make sense of what it means to be survivor of two suicides in an immediate family.

So, I did my best to shut it all down and covered it up with rationalizing and when that didn’t work—booze.

We always will miss our parents and our grandparents when they die.

It’s never a good time to lose family.

There’s never enough time, especially if we had good and functional relationships with them.

But—not all deaths are the same. They settle in our bones differently, impact our souls in unique ways.

Grief always packs a wallop, but tragedies and self-inflicted deaths, hit differently. They set death prematurely and at your loved one’s own hands.

I honor all losses and grief, but I do find myself sometimes wondering—

If even natural-death losses are so intense, what about the others? That aren’t?

So, today, I honor my feelings of anger and bitterness, my inner self that wants to snap to [my] life’s unfairness, not because those people don’t also deserve their mourning and heartbreak, but because I am tracing it deeper—

Because I am not an unfeeling person at all, so—

I consider my own visceral reaction and retort, and what it is meant to teach me. And I know it speaks to me of still unresolved and unprocessed, repressed feelings of loss and grief—

And, ultimately, the root of all of that, is pain…

So, today, I honor that.