I always had a fear of loss, especially back in the early days when my heart was a bigger part of me.  I imagined all my loved ones lined up in caskets and begged my father to assure me that he would never die.  I was, perhaps, four.  He told me, “All things that live die someday – even you.” 

Honesty is good but it wasn’t the reassurance I sought at four, even if my father told me he was going to be around for a long, long time.  The thought of losing him was unbearable, but worse – how would the world go on without me? Where would I go?  That question kept me awake most nights of my childhood.  Until I started to actually experience death.

My earliest experience with saying goodbye was to my dime-store turtles.  They were the only pets I was allowed to have so I loved them with a passion.  I even slept with the little red-eared cuties, which probably shortened their life spans.  Inevitably, they’d die within a few months and my mother would sacrifice another one of her jewelry boxes to an elaborate burial in the backyard while I sobbed inconsolably in the house.  I can still see her decked out in her kerchief and baggy woolen pants, preparing to inter the latest victim of my affections in the frozen ground beneath the New York snow with a tablespoon.  All of my Myrtles and Yertles seemed to die in the dead of winter.  Losing them absolutely killed me.

By the time I was seven, I had seen the demise of many reptiles, but also a duckling my parents thought would make a nice birthday present for me, since my birthday fell during Easter.  What was I supposed to do with a duck in a New York suburb?  I never had to find out because when I unwrapped my gift, the duckling’s neck was broken.  I don’t know whether my mother buried it or cooked it.  I, of course, had PTSD from the experience. 

By the time I was 12, I finally got a pet with fur on it – a kitten.  But when I expressed my concern about it dangling from the staircase by its toenails, my parents ditched the kitten while I was at school.  That was a different kind of goodbye.  That was a goodbye combined with fathomless rage.  Mine.

I lost my first human when I was 13.  My father’s father passed away at 73 and it was the first time I ever saw my father cry.  I went to my grandfather’s funeral and he looked very peaceful in his casket – and almost happy, with a pleasant smile on his face.  He had died in his sleep.  I felt a sense of loss but did not feel traumatized.

When I lost my paternal grandmother three years later, the experience was radically different.  She had suffered badly before she died and my very expressive mother put an image in my head that my psyche couldn’t deal with.  While the casket was closed, my imagination was wide open and, on the night of her funeral, my grandmother’s ghost came at me in my bedroom with eyes and mouth ajar, wild hair flying.  Her image knocked me back against my pillow.  Two years later, the same image visited me in my dorm room at college in Waltham, Massachusetts, trying to steal my life force.  The ensuing battle left me with temporary facial burns.  I was trying to say goodbye but she wouldn’t allow it.  Twenty years later, when I returned to my old dorm room with my husband, the image was still there, still grasping for my life.  I fled.

My maternal grandmother, the person who I was closest to in the world, died in my arms when I was 21.  Her’s was the first face I’d ever seen and mine was her last.  I had most of my life to anticipate this greatest of losses so, when it occurred, I expected to fall apart completely.  I didn’t.  In fact, I handled it well and felt like I helped her pass. I had an increasing sense that death was not necessarily a cessation of relationship.  In fact, I began to connect on a whole different level with those who had died.  

Over the years, I lost very close friends, lovers, my maternal grandfather, my unborn child, my in-laws, aunts, uncles, cousins, my brother-in-law and, finally, my father.  I was with them all shortly before they died – or while death was occurring.  And, in almost every instance, I felt a deepening of our eternal bond.  The only loss I found truly unbearable, ironically, was the loss of my cat, who was a constant companion for 21 years.  Of all creatures on Earth, he was a true soulmate and how do you say goodbye to that?  You don’t.  I don’t.  My last words of every day are, “Bring in the kitty” – and I haven’t owned a cat in a decade.  

In the past couple of years, I have experienced way too much loss – literally dozens of loved ones.  I am typically with them until the minute they leave, assuring them that I will continue to talk to them and immortalize them in my work.  And I do.

At the same time, I have become more acutely aware of those that I value in life.  I nurture those relationships. On the other hand, I am more comfortable saying goodbye to one-sided associations and those who don’t value me. I don’t let go easily but, eventually, I do release and It gets easier every day because, as they say, “Life is short.”  And sometimes that’s an understatement.