Who Are We Survived By? Creating Myself and Others in Loss

I share this as people are continuing to pass from COVID-19, and each week more are becoming aware of someone they know passing.  I hope you never know anyone who dies from COVID-19, and each day our likelihood of knowing someone goes up. I am not a grief counselor, but I have found that creating myself and others has worked for me when confronting loss.

Surviving Loss

I have been confronting loved ones dying for as long as I remember. I guess you have too.  Starting with my great grandparents, I remember their funerals, and I do not remember who they were.  Most of my memories are of the stories told about them from my grandparents.  I was sad, but their death did not confront me, I was seven when the last one passed.

When my grandparents passed away, my experience was different.  I knew them. Being with them, in the good and not so good,  I became much of who I am. I remember reading their obituary in the newspaper. "Francis Macklin is survived by Ronald Macklin." I could relate to the word survived, as that is all I felt I could do. Most of them passed when I was in my early teens with the last passing when I was twenty-five.

For the next twenty years, my surrogate grandparent/close friend was Jun, Koni's Uncle.  When he passed away the story that came to mind first was surviving.  I tossed myself the line, "In honor of who Jun was to me and who I created myself to be from our conversations, who do I choose to be today?"

Creating Myself Through Loss

During a loss, I find I can get focused on me, as I miss my friend. And that is all about me. When I focus on how they triggered me to create myself, I usually start crying out of gratitude, and I want to share our stories with others (sometimes I make up I bore people with my stories.)

When I shared my stories of Jun with others, they asked me to speak at his funeral. As I prepared to speak, my Sacred-Self and my physical self were out pacing in the parking lot, when I heard his voice in my head saying “thank you.”  To this day. I still create Jun to be fun, interested, and authentic.

Every time I think of Jun, my friend, I smile.

If you're up to it, who do you create the deceased to be? Who would the deceased create you to be? If you could create yourself, in honor of the dead, who would you create yourself to be?

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