Stephanie Jean

Loss is such a funny way to describe death. Loss. Like the way you’d lose your keys or misplace an important piece of paper. The thing about loss in regular language is that it implies the thing lost can be found. That’s not the case when you “lose” someone to death.

When someone dies, they typically don’t come back. Sure, we’ve all heard the stories of the people who have turned away from the light and come back, people who have been resuscitated after their heart stopped, etc. But typically, when you cross that threshold from life to death, you’re gone. Those who lost you won’t find you in their current state of being. 

I’m not a fan of describing it like that. My Papa died on Friday. Period. He “lost” his battle to cancer-melanoma on his lungs, can you believe it?-but we didn’t really lose him. 

Energy never dies. Therefore, his soul, his energy, his spirit, the impacts his life here on Earth have made, live on.

The rippling effects from his life will continue to echo forever. I don’t pretend to know what the afterlife is like, but I do know that in our known world, one small coincidence can change the course of history. Did you know Hitler was almost shot and killed by a Brit in WWI, but in a split second act of compassion the Brit lowered his gun and let him walk? That split second altered history. If your great-great-great-great grandparents never met, you wouldn’t exist. Their choice to have a child, who had another, and then another, who happened to pass on a specific sequence of DNA made you. But if your parents had sex and made babies at a different time, you wouldn’t exist because the likelihood of conceiving YOU, with that exact sperm/egg combo, just doesn’t exist. It wouldn’t have happened. I try not to think about this too much as it blows my mind.

So no, I don’t believe we lost my Papa. His life has impacts we don’t yet even know. He’s dead, sure, I don’t mind putting it bluntly. His body won’t exist ever again. I can’t call him up to have him immediately hand the phone to my grandmother, who likes talking on the phone way more than he ever did. But the fact that his life echoes- and all the loved ones we’ve lost, their life echoes too, especially in our hearts and in our lives- is of comfort to me. Maybe someone else out there can find comfort in this, too.