By Harry Cummins
This year has been one of inconsolable loss.
There is no handbook on heartbreak. Each of us is left to deal with searing loss in our own way. I can tell you that I am sorry for your specific loss... but I cannot tell you that I know exactly how you feel.
Today, the final day of 2020, is full of sorrow. Yet, the midnight sky tonight will be filled with fireworks. I am not sure why. Maybe it's simply hope for a New Year manifested in tradition. My dog, however, will feel frightened and many of you will wonder what others have to celebrate.
Each person that we love and then loose, is a uniquely private matter. I, too, have loved and lost but can't offer so much as a clue as to how you should deal with your grief. I can say to those in mourning, that my heart goes out to you. I know something about how often my own ambulant heart leaves current comfort spots in search of a resting place in the sweet memories of a lost loved one.
As social media fills the airways today with the names and faces of all the famous we have lost in 2020, I invite you to find comfort for your personal and private loss in the lyrics of a 1967 song by the Bee Gees, "To Love Somebody" The love you still long for in this world is very real and did not die with your loved one. Your love for somebody is highly singular...yet universal.
" You don't know what it's like to love somebody..
..To love somebody..
The way I love you."
Barry Gibb, Robin Gibb (The Bee Gees)
I still believe there is a kind of love, a certain kind of light, in this world that "Beareth all things, beliveth all things, hopeth all things."
That is the sort of illumination we need to send skyward tonight along with our pyrotechnics.
Illustration for this story is by David Delamare, an Oregon artist who died in 2016. He leaves behind his art..and those who love him.
hcummins@aol.com
Amen to that.
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