A Year of Loss
It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since the pandemic robbed us of life as we knew it.
And in this frightful year I’ve lost several beloved friends. Although it was cancer and heart disease that took them, it was Covid that kept us from gathering together to mourn. Zoom funerals and memorial services didn’t allow us to embrace, or cry in comforting arms, leaving many bereft to deal with our grief alone. I’ve written about three of my lost friends. (See Comfort Food for Renee, Inks and Derek: Art and the Cricket Scores and Cantor Gladys)
I will write about the last, but for now I grieve.
Renee, Derek, Gladys, and Gerhard
RetroFlash / 100 Words
– Dana Susan Lehrman
Dana Susan LehrmanThis retired librarian loves big city bustle and cozy country weekends, friends and family, good books and theatre, movies and jazz, travel, tennis, Yankee baseball, and writing about life as she sees it on her blog World Thru Brown Eyes!
www.WorldThruBrownEyes.com
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moving, well written
How very sad, Dana, but so beautifully put. This truly was a year of loss — including, as you so perfectly note, a loss in our ability to memorialize that loss. We grieve with you.
Many thanx John!
We had a Zoom shiva for our dear friend Stacy, taken in October at just fifty by a horrid neurological disorder. Having to refrain from physically comforting each other for our loss was terrible. I am sure that our healing has been made much harder by the enforced distance.
Sorry for your loss Dave, 50 is tragically too young.
A beautiful memorial, Dana. May their memory be for a blessing.
Thanx Betsy.
My heart goes out to you, Dana, for all those losses. I’ve been to several Zoom shivas and couldn’t visit my cousin Joe (whom I’ve written about on Retrospect) in his final days. This is when memory counts for a lot. Virtual hugs to you.
Thanx Marian, sorry for the loss of your cousin Joe, what is the name of your story about him, I’ll look for if.
Dana, I’m so sorry for all of your losses this year. It is so hard to do these things remotely when what we really need is to hug and hold one another.
Yes indeed Laurie, here’s to the light at the end of the tunnel.
Dana, the story is “Joe Defeats Google, Both Win.” I do miss his humor and fighting spirit.
Thanx Marian, will read!
We, your Retrospect family, grieve with you, Dana.. So very sorry for your losses. XO
Thanx Bebe, it’s hard to get used to the fact that we’re at that generation, losing friends and contemporaries.
These four friends were especially dear to us.
Sorry for your losses, Dana. It is hard not to be able to be with others when you are mourning.
Thanx Suzy, it’s indeed been an awful time, but light at the end of the tunnel.
Thanks for writing about the people you loved and still hold in your heart. This has been a year of loss in so many ways. You are not alone.
Thanx Khati, I have to keep reminding myself that we’re all in this together!
Most touching, Dana. I noted in today’s NYT a story about “preparing for grief”. Seems an oxymoron of sorts. Hold fast your memories in the face of your losses. Godspeed.
Thanx Tom, just today spoke to the widower of my Scrabble friend Gladys who’s having a hard time coping with her recent death, and spoke to another close friend whose sister is in hospice.
Am usually not the morbid type but now we’re at the age when we’re losing contemporaries much too often!
Loss has been so prominent this year. Plague, autocratic insanity, incomprehensible suffering, insurrection and — the life burden of death, grief’s grinding wheel always slow and difficult to turn, now seeming impossible. But you know how to do this, Dana. In due time. And in due time, extenuating tragedy will lift, grow lighter, become, once again, just barely manageable.
Thank you for your very beautiful yet painful images. Grief indeed seems a grinding wheel that we know in time will slow, and in time will be manageable – but barely manageable Charles, ah there’s the rub!