Loss/t

The human specie, according to Heidegger, is the only one that holds the capacity to describe death and to speak of it as Other. In that human capacity, we recognise the things we've lost, we emote strongly and feel passionately for we come to realise the impossibility of a return.

There is no soul on this earth with no experience of loss. To be human is to experience loss - the loss of time, the loss of yesterday, the loss of life's many competitions, the loss of a friend, the loss of a loved one, the loss of innocence, the loss of oneself...

We have all lost something, or someone. And no matter how one deals with the pain that is birthed from loss - to excise it with a scapel or keep it under lock and key in a dusty closet stacked in a dark corner of our within - we never really stop feeling the loss and we are always haunted by it. Like the spectre of history, it remains and always will. At times one believes one can run from the pain, find ways to exorcise the hurt. But we can never elude it for it comes from within and no distraction, no pretence will dispel the hauntings. It mutates, metamorphses, transforms and takes shape; it becomes part of who we are.

And so we go on living, the loss becomes a part of us. One learns to co-exist, to recognise it, to even embrace it. It begins to shape one's reality, one's identity. The pain, the loss never goes away.

As we sit silently awaiting death, figurative or literal, as our life flashes past in a pastiche of images, sounds, smells in the final moments before we step into the eternal void, we remember... not the things we've had but the things we've lost... And the things that will never be again.

The fabric of human existence is woven with the 'what ifs'...