When someone we love is taken from us

Sep 10, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – After my first encounter with the Guru, I had to probe for some more life lessons. I pressed Guru a much heavier question. “Guru,” I said, “how does one recover from losing someone one loves?”

He did not answer immediately. Perhaps there are some questions that deserve silence before words. I had lost someone close to me, and I had discovered what everyone eventually discovers: there is no preparing for the emptiness left behind when someone who has occupied a place in your life suddenly occupies a place only in your memories.

The house is still there. The chair is still there. The cell phone may still contain the person’s number. But there is no longer a voice at the other end. And somehow, the world continues. The sun rises. People go to work. Children go to school. Traffic moves. People laugh. And you wonder how the universe can continue behaving normally when, for you, nothing feels normal anymore.

The Guru looked at me. “Do you want to forget the person?”

“No,” I said quickly.

“Then why do you say you want to recover?”

I had never thought about it that way. Perhaps recovery from grief is not forgetting. Perhaps it is learning how to remember without being destroyed by remembering.

The Guru reminded me of a story in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna encounters Arjuna at a moment of profound emotional turmoil. Seeing his relatives, friends and revered teachers standing among those he is expected to fight, Arjuna is overcome with grief and doubt. He lowers his bow, unable to bring himself to fight, and, in his anguish, turns to Krishna as his teacher and guide. He fears that taking part in the war will bring sin, destroy the traditions that hold families together, and unleash suffering on a devastating scale.

And Krishna begins one of the most profound conversations about life, death and the nature of the self. The central Hindu teaching is that what we call the person is more than the physical body. The body is temporary; the atman, the deeper self, is not. Just as a person discards worn-out garments and puts on new ones, the embodied self passes from one body to another. For someone grieving, this is an invitation to consider that death may be a change of form rather than the annihilation of existence.

Whether one accepts reincarnation literally, metaphorically or not at all, there is something powerful in the Hindu insistence that death should not make us believe that the life of the person we loved has become meaningless. Their body may be gone.  But their influence remains. Their words remain. Their kindness remains. The values they taught us remain. And, perhaps most importantly, something of them continues through the people they touched.

I asked the Guru, “But what should I do with the pain?”

He answered, “Do not fight it.”

That surprised me.

“Grief is the price we pay for love,” he said. “If you loved deeply, you will grieve deeply. Do not be ashamed of that.”

Perhaps we make another mistake when we speak about “getting over” someone. We don’t get over people we truly loved. We grow around the absence. The wound becomes a scar. It does not disappear, but it no longer bleeds every day. The Hindu understanding of attachment offers another difficult lesson. We naturally want the people we love to remain with us forever. We want to possess their presence, their voice, their embrace, their companionship.

But nothing in the material world is permanent. Everything changes. Everything ages. Everything eventually passes. This does not mean that we should love less. It means that we should love without pretending that we own what we love. When someone dies, we are forced to confront a truth we spend much of our lives avoiding the fact that our time with one another is borrowed. And if our time is borrowed, perhaps we should use it differently. Call the person you keep meaning to call. Say “I love you” while the person can hear you. Forgive the argument that has gone on too long. Visit the parent. Hug the child. Sit with the friend. Don’t postpone affection.

The Guru was quiet again. Then he said something I have never forgotten. “When someone you love dies, do not ask only, ‘What have I lost?’ Ask also, ‘What did this person give me that I can now carry forward?’”

That question changes grief. It does not remove the pain. But it gives the pain somewhere to go. The kindness of a mother can become kindness in her child. The courage of a father can become courage in his son. The wisdom of a grandparent can become a lesson passed to another generation. The laughter of a friend can become a memory that still brings warmth years later. Perhaps this is one way in which the dead continue to live. Not in the sense that we deny death, but in the sense that love refuses to end simply because physical presence does. Eventually, I asked the Guru the question I had been afraid to ask. “Will the pain ever disappear?”

He smiled. “No,” he said. “But you will become larger than the pain.”

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• guru, losing someone, love, Peeping Tom

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