The Words We Don't Have

 

There is a quiet kind of grief that doesn't belong to me, yet it found its way into my heart anyway.

A friend of mine died recently. She was so young. We fought alongside her, hard and long, against cancer, that cruel thief that takes without asking. And when she had no more will to fight, we had to learn the hardest lesson of love: that sometimes holding on and letting go are the same act. I wish she could have stayed longer for her daughter, for her family. But I also wished, more than anything, for her to be free from the pain. Both wishes lived in me at once, and neither cancelled the other.

I've been sitting with a thought since then.

When we lose our parents, we become orphans. When a spouse dies, we become widows and widowers. We have names for these losses, as if language itself wanted to hold us in our sorrow. But there is no word for a parent who loses a child. Perhaps because it was never meant to happen. Perhaps because some grief is too heavy for any single word to carry.

Her mother and her brother are the ones closer to me, and I watched them. I watched a mother stand in a place no mother should ever stand. And somewhere in that watching, my mind turned to my own Mom.

I looked at her differently after that. I noticed her hands, her voice, the small habits I have always taken for granted. And a fear settled in me, quiet but unmistakable: please, let me outlive her. It sounds strange to pray for the loss of someone I love so deeply, but I understand now that it is the kinder order of things. I would rather carry the grief of burying my mother than ask her to carry the grief of burying me. That is the heartbreaking mercy hidden in the natural order of life: children are meant to outlive their parents.

I will not pretend this fear has an answer. No one gets to bargain with time. But I pray, humbly and sincerely, that God will be kind enough to spare my Mom, and me, from ever knowing that particular pain.

And so I am learning to hold two truths together. Life is fragile, and love is the only sensible response to that fragility. I can't control how many days I have with my Mom, but I can control how I spend them. I can call more often. I can sit longer. I can say the words before they become unspoken regrets.

My friend is free now. Her pain is gone. And though my heart aches for those she left behind, I find a strange peace in accepting what I cannot change, and in choosing to love louder because of it.

To my friend: rest well.

To her family: I am here.

To my Mom: I love you, and I am not taking a single day for granted.