The Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

Now it occurred to him that perhaps Terabithia was like a castle where you came to be knighted. After you stayed for a while and grew strong you had to move on …. Now it was time for him to move out. She wasn’t there, so he must go for both of them. It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.

“I just keep trying to remind myself that even though I’ve lost their love, I was blessed to have had it for so many years. If anything, I was overly loved,” I explained to my friend J as I battled profound grief.

“That’s right. Now what are you going to do with that [love]?” he challenged.

The straightforward dare wasn’t made in frustration; in fact, it was presented to me in Christian fellowship. Nevertheless, it caught me off guard. I knew not how to respond for I had never truly loved outside the bounds of familial or romantic relationships. And yet, it made perfect sense.

What good was all that love I’d experienced and witnessed if I couldn’t pass on my loved ones’ torch in their absence? So, I filed the advice in a corner of my mind, waiting for the grief to subside enough that I could examine it from a rational perspective.

Several months later, the ebony cloak of depression finally starting to lift, another conversation brought the challenge back into the light.

“He was good for me, but not in the way he probably expected,” I confessed to an older confidante about a dating situation gone sour. “Through him, I realized that losing love isn’t the worst it gets. I could have had a life like his and never known that love at all.”

I then went on to clarify, “I guess I just couldn’t understand why God could give me these people to love only to take them away from me.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, my confidante replied, “I guess they were His before they were yours; maybe He just lent them to you.”

Surely, it’s a loan I wish I never had to pay back, but there’s solace in knowing I can fully entrust them to my Creditor’s hands. Perhaps realizing that, I can now move on for all of us.

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter and bread with only the scent of jam spread on top of it. It was the best time of her life.

Not knowing it would be our last (or perhaps subconsciously fully knowing it) heart to heart, the last meaningful conversation I had with my grandmother began with us working on her “Grandmother’s Memories” book. With her now 92 years old and nearly blind, this activity consisted of me reading her the questions, her orally relating her responses and me scribbling frantically to keep up with her still very spry mind.

Somehow, the storytelling drifted over to memories of the past, when I would spend every Saturday night with her and my grandfather in their tiny spare bedroom in the trailer they called home on the weekends.

“Those are the days I wish I could go back to,” she declared.

Knowing her to be anything but the melancholic or reminiscent type, I eyed her suspiciously while I contemplated the idea of her wished-for time travel.

“I’m not sure I’d want to go that far back,” I answered honestly. After all, my age still numbered in the single digits back then. If I were going to break the time barrier with my beloved grandmother, I wanted it to be a period during which the core of my being was fully formed.

Two months later, as she lay on her deathbed, I second (and third and fourth) thought that response. Suddenly, there was something highly appealing about going back to a place and time when you knew you were over-loved and were oblivious to everything else.

Unfortunately, wish as we might, this life doesn’t afford us the ability to go back, but even if just for a moment, “I wish we could too, Nan. It was the best time of my life.”

Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth

"Unexpectedly, and in the midst of his anxieties, he found himself visited by compassion for this self-willed son of his, for whom life had always been a succession of self-imposed tests and ordeals."

I'm a perfectionist...always have been, always will be. Although my parents always encouraged me to do my best, only the VERY best would do for me. This self-imposed pressure goes all the way back to my single digits. Vivid case in point: In the third grade, I got an F on a workbook exercise (not a quiz or test, keep in mind) because I didn't follow the directions correctly. I clearly recall being so upset about it that when I showed it to my mom that night, I was crying my eyes out, not because I thought she'd be mad about it (I knew she wouldn't--in that moment, she probably found herself visited by compassion for her self-willed daughter) but because I knew I'd stupidly performed at less than my very best. I had no one to blame for my failure but myself. Therein lay the real worm eating away at my wise-beyond-its-years soul.

This is the first of the self-imposed ordeals I put myself through that I can remember (although there were probably a few prior to it) but it certainly wasn't the last. To this day, I still beat myself up over even the slightest flaws I detect in myself...most usually these days in regard to my work output. This character trait of mine is both a blessing and a curse. Although it turned me into a stellar student and subsequent entrepreneur, my life was been wrought with anxieties over an inability to at all times attain the impossible: perfection. Were she still alive, I've no doubt my mother would still feel that same compassion for her daughter she felt all those years ago, when a bright red F brought her nine-year-old offspring to inconsolable tears. Unfortunately, the only glaring difference between then and now is that I no longer have her loving arms to take away the bitter sting. Perhaps after twenty-five years, it's time I finally worked on letting this affliction of mine go...for anxiety's sake, for her sake, but most of all for my sake.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Thinking about the long road ahead makes me sad. That's natural, isn't it, Messire, even when you know that happiness awaits you at the end of the road?

As a Christian, I view life as a journey, one that tests us and challenges our spirit. In enduring and passing these tests, I believe that our souls grow in preparation of the better world that awaits us on the other side. Then, when we've learned all that we were sent here to learn, it's time to pass over that invisible dividing line between the earthly and the unearthly. That's my theory anyway.

But despite my firm belief in an afterlife, I still struggle with the idea that God gives us people to love only to one day snatch them away from us. Thankfully for most of us, life is a long road, and if we're fortunate, it's full of joyous moments that fill our souls to overflowing. And yet each time that cruel act of separation strikes us, that road ahead looks long and sad indeed...at times almost unbearable to traverse in the absence of yet another travel partner.

I trust that what awaits me at the end of that road is a happiness the likes of which I can't possibly imagine in my mortal form, and so I plod onward. But without those I love by my side, my steps slow...if only momentarily. They say that time is irrelevant in the afterworld...that those who've passed on barely notice our absence, so quickly does it seem to them that we're with them again. How gracious of God to grant them that grace. I guess therein lies the justice in death.

Right now, my road ahead is looking pretty sad, but I suppose that is indeed very natural. After all, no one ever said that this lesson we call life would be an easy one, nor should it be. Until I reach that unbridled happiness at the end, I must remind myself that while they're no longer with me in a physical sense, the loved ones I've lost nonetheless accompany me each step closer I inch toward them. And when at last we meet again, every second of heartache will be vindicated for all eternity.

The Bone People

A family can be the bane of one's existence. A family can also be most of the meaning of one's existence. I don't know whether my family is bane or meaning, but they have surely gone away and left a large hole in my heart.

Although there have been rare occasions when my family was the bane of my existence, all kidding aside, I do know whether my family is bane or meaning. They are beyond a doubt the latter. Earlier this year, I was faced with the unbearable loss of three close family members, one right after the other. By the time the third funeral rolled around, I no longer knew whether I was coming or going. As we prepared my aunt's memory board, my cousin and I got to talking. She mentioned that it was guilt that was keeping her brother, who lives 1,000 miles away, from attending his mother's funeral.

In unusual form, I responded, "Sometimes I wish I'd taken off after high school, never to return. It would make losing people so much easier."

Caught a litte off guard, she implored, "No, don't ever say that."

I quickly covered myself with: "I'd never trade what I had but ...."

In that moment, I meant what I said. Faced with profound grief, it would have been easier to lose these people I loved so much if I hadn't allowed them so deeply and inextricably into my heart, but I meant it only for a moment.

I've learned the hard way that love and pain cannot exist separately. You cannot fully experience one without, at some point, facing the other. To steal an overused expression, "It's better to have lost at love than never to have loved at all."

Yep, a lot of people I've loved have 'surely gone away and left a large hole in my heart,' but had I never loved them, I'd have no heart at all.