Being a witness is difficult.

Continuing to look without turning your head and keeping your focus on merely on your love is tough.

I am writing this crying.

One of my soul sisters is in hospital struggling.

I have a lump in my throat.

Whatever I eat or drink, it is stuck there.

Loving a person means continuing living knowing that one day you might say goodbye to the person you love. Living knowing that you will die is really the biggest resistance. I don’t remember who said this but I cannot be the first one to say this. It is such a plain fact.

My sorrow demonstrates the depth of my love. I am in grief because I love her so much. I am observing what the possibility of not being able to see my sister again is doing to me.

Basically this possibility exists in all relationships, so I had better say being aware of the possibility.

I keep on looking at our photos time and again. I caress her face in the photos. There are videos of ours taken when I last came to Turkey. I watch them. I can’t hold back my tears.

I am trying to exist with the sadness I feel without saying “You should stay here. You shouldn’t die.” This I find the most difficult because I love her so much.

Grief is a sort of initiation process and this process is described in three stages. The first one is leaving the existing order or breaks from it due to some news you have got or an experience you have had. The second one is alienation. A transition to a space not known to you, different from the former order, the one where you don’t feel comfortable and the one where you don’t know even yourself. Staying in this space is quite troublesome. This is the very place which all of us call grief. However, when the periods before and after the grief are not mentioned, what grief is cannot be comprehended completely. The third one is return to normal in time. Nevertheless, this return is never the one to the order before the break. What is meant is rebirth as a new self with the things this process adds to you and the release of the things that are no longer serving you.

I envisage this process as a cycle. The start and end points are the same. On this cycle everyone in the world proceeds many times. Not only grief but every important event we experience appear as a distinct initiation; transition from childhood to adolescence, ageing, getting married, getting divorced, having a child, moving, graduating, getting ill and dying…It is not my first transition in most of this process, nor my first initiation experience. I have continued living transforming into a different Berna as a result of each of them, and I am still doing it.

What if the process is the same for death?

I thought long and hard during my son’s illness that healing does not consist of only physical healing. Asking for physical healing is quite normal especially the person in question is your loved one but what if healing has some invisible aspects? What if I want this person to stay here just for the sake of my love?

I can carry my love in my heart but my heart is too small for sorrow, sibling of love, and the unknowns in life. I want to entrust myself and all my loved ones to something greater than me. Whenever I remember our small but valuable existence in the universe, I can keep my focus on love itself. In an unconditional and unrequited way. My love won’t go anywhere and it will keep my loved ones alive as long as I am here. Even if they are dead.

I wish to always remember this.

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