Chapter 13. "I'm sorry." ✔️

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"Loss; there are so many different words that can be used to try and describe that unbearable feeling experienced following someone's death.

Sorrow. Misery. Sadness. Anguish. Pain. Distress. Agony. Torment. Suffering. Heartache. Despair. Mourning...

The list is extensive.

As far as words go, they are all good words, and they provide us with the means by which to try and succinctly describe a feeling which is anything but simple.

There is no simplicity in loss, in having to say goodbye to someone; especially someone who has been such an important and influential presence in your life from the very first moment that you were born into it.

How can you adequately describe a loss like that? How can you put any sort of value on its significance?

The answer: you can't.

That kind of loss is devastating. It is overwhelming. It bleeds into every aspect of your life and leaves marks on your soul which cannot be cleansed.

A loss like that haunts you forever. It will always be able to touch you, even when you think that it cannot. It does not have an expiration date. It expires only when you do.

So how do you begin to try and understand a loss that's consequences and repercussions are so far-reaching?

How do you learn to accept something that is so destructive, something that has an impact so damaging that it has the power to ruin you completely?

I wish that I knew the answer to those questions, but I don't. I don't know the answers to a lot of things.

All I know is that loss isn't simple. It is complex. It is difficult to understand and even harder to come to terms with.

Lauren is struggling to do just that. In fact, she is finding it an impossible challenge, and I do not envy it at all.

How is she expected to be able to make sense of something which seems so senseless?

There is no explanation that will ever suffice for her. There is no reason that will ever be adequate enough to justify a loss that is so infinitely earth-shattering. She will never be able to rationalize her mom's death because there is no logical purpose that it serves.

It just...is.

That is what makes it so troubling for her: the idea that death can touch anyone, for absolutely no reason at all, other than that it chooses to.

It is a disturbing thought, but it is an even more disturbing reality. One which even the most intellectual of us still cannot explain.

You will never be prepared for loss, no matter how much time you are given beforehand. It is always a shock, always a surprise, always an inevitability that we like to try and reduce to nothing more than an unlikelihood.

It will never touch us. It will never take those that we love.

It will never happen to me. I am invincible. I am young. I am healthy. I am any number of things which mean that I am immune to its reach. I am stronger than death and so, therefore, I am immortal.

Only we aren't. And I am not.

Death lingers on my skin, and it has stilled my heart, and stolen the breath from my lungs.

It made me a slave to its existence. It made me crave it, made me fear it, made me question everything that I ever thought that I knew about it.

Death is not a mystery to me. It is not an improbability. It is real. I have felt it.

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