Reflection on Love and Loss
My friend Tim died today, and though I’m easily moved, I’m surprised at how hard it seems to be hitting me. I keep bursting into tears. I know enough to let the tears flow. Tears have a logic of their own—one that I don’t need to understand. I simply obey, and let the tears fly where they may. I count on their cleansing effect.
Tim was ten years older than I am. Eighty-four is a pretty good run, I guess. I knew he had esophageal cancer and was very sick, but I suppose I expected him to pull out of it. I had more years of friendship planned, which reminds me of the line, “Want to hear God laugh? Tell him your plans.”
Part of the price of living into old age is watching friends leave the stage before you do. It’s one of the harder parts of aging—seeing that you’re walking alone on a path where your friend once walked beside you.
All my memories of Tim are happy ones. He was the sort of friend who made me feel good just to be with him. I always felt we were completely comfortable with one another—that we could say anything to each other. I guess I feel that way about all my friends. That feeling is probably why we became friends.
We keep walking on the path in front of us, the path that adds up to a life. The physical loneliness I experience at the loss of someone close to me is more than offset by the knowledge that the love between friends can’t disappear because there’s nowhere for it to go. I miss my friend, and know I will for a long time. But the thing that was most real between us—that bond of friendship, which is just another way of saying the bond of love—shines as strongly as it did the last time we laughed together.
Tim, thank you for everything.
Sometimes loss invites us to look more deeply at what it means to let go. You might like my reflection: Are Acceptance and Surrender the Same Thing?
