The Void

There is this place we go emotionally when we have experienced very traumatic things in our lives. It isn’t a place that you notice right away, it isn’t a place you could explain because when you’re there you aren’t aware of it. This unknown and indescribable place is a place I am in from time to time. It is hard to explain but I will give it a shot.
When people you love the most in the world are taken from you, there are spaces in your soul that go unattended. You grieve, you go through your cycle, but you never truly capture acceptance. When I am in that space I feel the extremes of my emotions. If you are close to me and you do the slightest thing that would normally be brushed off, it actually hurts more. Instantly my response is to shut down, shut you out; make you so fed up with me that you disconnect from me. In doing that, in that moment, I feel like I’m protecting myself from losing you. When we are getting along, the smallest gesture is a feeling of winning the lottery. It could be just the fact that you hugged me, remembered something I said, making me coffee, etc.
You start to feel stronger in areas but the stronger you become the more emotional you are. Where you wouldn’t cry often at all, you cry all the time. Where a moment of fun and laughter was great, it is now so amazing you don’t want the moment to stop. At the end of the night while in bed you face the ultimate fear…death and it sits at your bedside staring you right in your eyes. Your body begins to heat up and your heart races, you have that flash of darkness and you can’t feel anything, you can’t see anything, there isn’t anyone there to grab you, for that moment you feel death taking you. As soon as it starts, it goes away. You lay there wondering what in the hell is going on with me? Why am I not free from this grief? Why am I so terrified at the inevitable?

I call it “The Void”. As I am typing this I am starting to understand it more. It isn’t necessarily death; it is the emptiness that remains when you experience loss. In actuality there will never be anyone to ever fill those places in your soul because the people that are no longer there cannot be replaced. The fear you have is that you actually are trying to forget them; you are placing people in your life to cover the emptiness. When you snap, it’s your subconscious attacking you for attempting to move on and move forward.

If this doesn’t make sense, it’s probably because death and loss doesn’t make sense. We are told about the life cycle, how everything must meet its end, how things happen for a reason, but no one explains what happens to you individually after you’ve gotten to “acceptance”. We are all wired differently, advice on this magnitude is useless because you could never truly understand what that person experiences daily after such a tragedy. Losing my father, brother, mother, lover, cousins, friends, etc changed me and as much as I would love to believe that I am stronger and I am able to make it through it, the truth is, I am still that son, that brother, that cousin, that friend…wishing I could still have that title in the living world and not just in memories. One day I will face the void again, but this time I will not fear it, I will make an attempt to understand it.