Serious Thought for the day

As many of you who have been reading this blog a long time know that today is the anniversary day my previous partner, Ron, went into Hospice Care after 16 1/2 yrs of living with AIDS he just could not recover.  Eleven short days later on December 21, 2002 he was dead.  Many ways, I have never been the same since and probably never will be.  Until last night while reading "Losing Julia" by Jonathan Hull I felt like no one understand what that feeling was like then I read.......

"One person dies and the whole world looks sadder, hollowed out  so that you hear echos in places where there aren't supposed to be any.  Each passing day and month and year is an accumulation of absences; of people, places and events that a loved one will never see or know about.  When you have suffered a terrible loss you look at things and think: I wonder what he would have made of that?  Wouldn't he have enjoyed this and oh G-d he would have hated that and shit this reminds me of him.

When people die it's as though the earth itself opens briefly and swallows them up.

The last thing people do when they die is to change all the people who loved them.  I can still feel the dead reverberating through my own life, sometimes with the delicacy of ripples on a pond, other times with the force of shock waves.  And the strangest thing is how much talking the dead still do; talking in our heads.  I've actually grown quite fond of it.

But I can't shake the sadness. Sometimes nostalgia swamps me like a flash flood and leaves me floating face down amid the flotsam of the past.  Not the nostalgia that comes with the change of the seasons--which is as good as sad gets: a rusty, blood red if you gave it a color--but deeper, more funereal longing.  Melancholy if you will."

I haven't cried like that in a long time or felt so lonely in my life, but also like finally words were given to what I really felt.  What I really needed to say.  Someone got me and in a big way.  Eight years ago today, where has the time gone?  His voice fading from my memory, but those memories just as alive and fresh and real as they were all those years ago.

So my thought for the day is do you feel that this section from "Losing Julia" adequately describes what you have gone through in having someone you love die?