While we all wish for some lasting peace and quiet from time to time to find serenity in a world that becomes more intrusive and invasive. At the same time, we yearn to hear thoughts and voices again of those long lost from our lives. While the wider world can get loud, obtrusive, or downright annoying with its cacophony of sounds and noises, we yearn unsuccessfully for the unique sounds and voices from those who are long gone from this world, never to be heard from again.
Loss of loved ones and their physical presence leave a gaping hole in our lives never to be replaced. Yes, you can make new friends, establish new loving relationships, but long past are the days from your youth or even adulthood where you can count on a grandparent or even a parent to be there by your side, providing you their unconditional love, support, or encouragement.
We may be surrounded by people every day, mostly strangers, maybe a few friends, but our inner world shrinks down further when we lose the people who knew us best. Very few people in this world are there with you from birth or childhood and they can never be replaced once they pass away. When someone you’ve known your whole life goes away, it leaves a deep empty feeling and a kind of quiet that sustains just how a big loss it was from your immediate world. Memories and mementos help to ease the pain, but they are only a poor substitute or a shadow at best when it comes to establishing just how much they meant to your life.
How does one deal with the huge void that your loved one left when they passed? Well, I don’t have any easy answer here, but it’s important to do your best to think about how they would see you now that they are gone, what they would think about your life now even though they’re no longer there with you, and how would you honor their memory as best as you can with what you shared with them during your time together. Telling their story to others, putting yourself out there to establish new friendships or relationships, and preventing yourself from isolating yourself further from the wider world are all good ways to move forward even if the quiet remains when you can no longer talk to them or hear their voice.
Perhaps that is one of the stranger realities of getting older: the world around us may become larger, while our immediate world becomes smaller. We meet new people, travel to new places, build careers, fall in love, make friends, and create lives that our younger selves could never have imagined. Yet there are certain people from our earlier days who belong to a part of our story that no one else can ever occupy. We may have known them 20, 30, 40 years or so from our life’s beginning but they don’t get to see how the second half of our lives play out without them there to guide or help us. When they are gone, we don’t simply lose a person who was special to us. We lose one of the voices and presences that helped make our world feel like home.
Maybe the goal, then, isn’t to eliminate the quiet that remains. Maybe it is to learn how to live alongside it. To carry the stories, habits, humor, lessons, and memories of those we’ve lost into the lives we are still living. The quiet is painful because it reminds us that something precious is missing, but it is also evidence that something precious was once there. Perhaps the best way to honor the beloved people whose voices we can no longer hear is to keep living loudly enough that, in some small way, their influence can still be heard and felt through us.
