Making Sense of a Broken Heart
Almost five years ago, my only sibling died. When it happened, I was absolutely stunned. It was completely out of left field and made absolutely no sense to me. There are still are so many questions surrounding what happened to her. However, the biggest question for me was why it happened. The journey to find the answer signed me up for a ton of PTSD. There were countless days that bled into nights of staring at walls, wondering how something so horrible could happen.
Some days, I rationalized it with the same thing that I’ve said to patients diagnosed with cancer, “sometimes bad things happen to good people.” While it helped slow down the tears, I still couldn’t digest it. She had so much life in her.
She wanted to experience so much, and her own blog, broadist.com had so many followers. My sister exuded love and acceptance and she made it her mission to share that with the world...which brought back the question of why did she have to go.
One night, I reached out to a dear friend who is very religious. His advice still sits in my heart. He said, there are three ways of looking at death. The first one is that if the adage of God taking the good ones first holds true, maybe she was too good to remain on earth and was thus taken away. In my opinion, this thought paints God as a selfish entity. I mean, really? Can you imagine being friends with someone who simply waltzes in and takes the best of the best, then leaves? WTF? How can we be expected to be selfless when God is selfish. Thus, that theory had to be tossed. A selfish God can’t be real.
The second way of looking at death is that maybe God is a complete jerk and tore my sister away from me simply for sport. After all, people are killed everyday in all kinds of gruesome ways and it’s easy to wonder where the hell was God for those folks. The concept of God being cruel doesn’t sit well with me either. If the world, with all of its splendor, was created by God, then God must be good. Right? According to all Abrahamic religions, we were created in God’s image and are loved. Thus, God can’t possibly be a jerk.
Finally, he said that if it’s true that God loves all of us, then it’s fair to say that we are pretty much all going to heaven. If that’s the case, maybe death has less to do with the person dying and more to do with the people who experience the loss. The deceased person isn’t suffering, he or she is likely enjoying whatever is on the other side. It’s the rest of us who need to learn to live without, and make the time we have left matter. For me, this made sense.
The loss of my sister taught me empathy on a different level. I learned the importance of giving love before it’s too late and appreciating the time I have with loved ones. Most of all, I learned that my world can be lonely if I let it, or it can be filled with friends who are masquerading as strangers. Soon enough, strangers seemed less strange. Knowing that there is the potential of having a world full of friends made failure less scary because it happens among friends.
One of the last conversations I had with my sister was on the importance of bravery. We promised each other that no matter how lofty or exciting a goal is, we would be brave so we can fully experience life. Maybe the lesson from this heartbreak is to stop hiding behind being shy and to be brave. Every morning, I have the privilege of waking up. Beyond that, there is the goal of being brave throughout the day in efforts of keeping my promise. Hopefully, she’ll be proud.