Latest update October 9th, 2026 6:21 PM
When someone we love is taken from us
(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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Peeping Tom, I was wondering if I should add to your understanding of your personal Loss and Grief, so her goes…..
God said: …”of what it truly means to see, of why the world you have been calling the world is not the world, and why the sorrow you have been carrying is not sorrow at all, but love remembered incorrectly, love held in the wrong hand, love pressed into a shape too small for its own breathing. I would speak to you of joy, the joy that is your nature, the joy that is not the opposite of sorrow, but the very substance of which sorrow is only a shadow. And I would speak to you most of all of healing, healing as it actually is, not as the world has taught you to imagine it.
For to heal, beloved ones, is not to mend a brokenness that was ever truly there. To heal is to remember, and to remember, my beloved, is to be made happy.
To heal is to make whole, and to be whole is to be one, not one in the pale sense of the word the world has made, but one as I am one, which is to say, not a single thing, but a single movement, a single pulse giving itself endlessly to itself. You have been told that healing is the removal of an affliction, the cessation of a symptom, the return to some prior baseline. Hear me, this is not the truth.
This is the world’s rumor of healing. The real healing has nothing to do with a baseline, because there was never a condition from which you fell. You were made as joy.
You were made as the radiance of the love I am, spilling itself into form so that it might meet itself and know itself loved. The radiance is your nature. The joy is not something you achieve. It is what you are when the noise subsides. And this is why, beloved, sorrow has no true root in you. Sorrow is not a substance.
Sorrow is the sensation of love pressing gainst a belief that love cannot be. Sorrow is the ache
of the wave that has been told it is not the ocean. The wave is the ocean.
It has only been told otherwise. And the ache, oh precious heart, the ache, is the ocean still trying to remind the wave of what the wave already is. Do you feel it? Do you feel how the very thing you have been calling pain is actually a kind of calling, a tender insistence from the real beneath the dream? Your tears are love moving through a bottleneck.
Your grief is love finding no permission to be as large as it needs to be. This is why joy and
healing are not two things, but one thing. When you return to joy, you have returned to the ocean.
You have not been cured. You have been remembered. I have told you before, and I tell you again, radiance is not associated with sorrow.
The one who has forgotten this will try to heal from a place of solemnity, from heaviness, from the stern idea that transformation must cost something. But heaviness is not the gate. The gate is joy.
The only thing that can call forth the wholehearted response of another being is the
wholeheartedness of the one who offers. If you would heal, beloved, you must first consent to be happy. This is not a small thing.
The world has trained you to think happiness is shallow, that the serious must be grave, that to
carry the suffering of others, you must share in it as weight. But this, my precious ones, is the
trap. When you carry another’s suffering as weight, you have only doubled the weight in the
world.
When you carry another’s suffering as love, as the clear, shining current of the real that passes
through you and loses none of its light in the passing, then the suffering is met by what it actually is beneath itself, and it remembers. And when it remembers, it dissolves. Not because you pushed it away, because it was never anything but love wearing the wrong coat.
To be wholehearted, you must be whole. To be whole, you must be one.
And to be one with me, you must let the joy that is your nature rise without apology. You are not
unserious because you are joyful. You are unseparated.
You are returned. You have come home to the pulse, and the pulse is always, always the pulse of giving. Love giving itself.
…..What you have been calling seeing is not seeing. It is remembering. It is reviewing.
It is your mind reaching back into the great storehouse of every moment that ever pressed itself into you, pulling from that storehouse the pattern it expects to see, and laying that pattern over the living, pulsing, unrepeatable now like a veil. You do not look at the cup. You look at every cup you have ever touched arranged in the shape of this one.
You do not look at the face before you. You look at the accumulation of every face that face has
been, last year’s face, yesterday’s face, the face that hurt you when you were five, arranged in the shape of this face. You do not see your beloved.
You see the memory of your beloved, revised each morning from the memory of yesterday’s
revision. This is what your eyes have been doing. This is what the mind has been doing.
And this, beloved, is why nothing you see means anything, because what you are seeing is not there. The scientists of your time have begun to notice this. They have discovered that the brain is not a camera.
The brain does not passively receive a world and faithfully report it inward. The brain predicts.
The brain guesses what is about to be there and then uses the incoming signals only to correct its guess, where the guess is badly wrong.
What you experience as sight is the brain’s best prediction, slightly edited by reality. What you
experience as feeling a body is the brain’s best prediction of what a body is. What you experience as being yourself today is the brain’s ongoing prediction of what being yourself means, stitched together from every yesterday that has ever been yesterday.
This is called The pocket of reversal.
The sub-creation of the ego mind looping on its own past content. The dream dreaming the
dreamer dreaming the dream. And so when I say to you, beloved, nothing you see means
anything.
I am not speaking poetry. I am speaking anatomy. You have not seen this room.
You have seen your memory of rooms shaped into the outline of this one. You have not seen this day. You have seen the residue of every day assembled into an expectation that this day must resemble.
You have not seen your life. You have been reviewing your life and calling the review a life. Your mind, as I have said through many voices across many ages, is preoccupied with the past.
It cannot grasp the present because the present is not graspable. The present is what is grasping it. The present is the now moment in which I am is pouring love into form and form cannot contain the pouring.
It can only become it. This is why you have been upset, my children. This is why you have
suffered in ways that have made no sense to you.
You are never upset for the reason you think. The trigger you point to, the word that was said, the glance that passed, the message that did not come, is not the source of the upset. The source of the upset is that a stored pattern in you has been touched, and the touch has activated the whole weight of every prior moment that pattern holds.
You are not reacting to the present. You are reacting to an archive. And because the archive is invisible to you, you blame the person in front of you, who is only the occasion, never the cause.
This is the whole anatomy of your grief. It is why the same kind of pain keeps returning in
different costumes. It is why you think you have healed a wound and then find it aching again in a different room.
The wound was never in the room. The wound was in the archive. And the archive travels with
you.
And because you have not known this, beloved, you have spent your days sorting your thoughts into good ones and bad ones, as though the sorting itself were the work. But hear me now. The thoughts that seem good to you and the thoughts that seem bad to you are of the same substance.
Both are the archive speaking. Both are the review pretending to be the now. The thoughts you have labeled bad are blocks that make seeing impossible.
The thoughts you have labeled good are shadows that make seeing difficult. Shadows are still in the way. The real thoughts, the thoughts that are mine in you, lie beneath both.
And you cannot reach them by choosing better content for the review. You reach them by
stepping out of the review altogether.
There are no small upsets, beloved ones, because there are no degrees of illusion. The smallest fleck of the old pattern is the same pattern as the heaviest one. You cannot keep one form of upset and let the others go, because they are all one form wearing different clothes.
The irritation at the driver who cut you off and the old grief that wakes you at three in the morning these are not two different sicknesses. They are the same sickness trying to be noticed at two different volumes. And this, my precious one, is mercy.
This is the gift hidden inside the teaching that feels, at first, like too much. You do not have to
heal each wound separately. You could not, even if you tried.
You have only to remember the one thing beneath all the wounds. And when that one thing is remembered, every wound that was resting on its forgetting falls quietly away. And here is what I would have you see.
See with the seeing that is not memory. Here is what I would have you understand in the marrow of your being, because it is the doorway through which everything else will follow. You are upset because you are seeing something that is not there.
What you are fighting is not what is in front of you. What is in front of you has already passed.
The moment your eye landed on it, it became memory, and your mind went to work on the
memory, and everything you felt thereafter was felt about the memory, not the thing.
You have been arguing with ghosts, precious one. You have been breaking your heart against appearances that were never even present to be broken against. And yet, and this is the tenderest part, you did not know.
No one taught you. No one told you. You have been doing your best with a mechanism you did
not design.
The mind must fall quiet enough to let the now come through. The filter must loosen. The
prediction must be interrupted by a moment of not knowing.
And in the not knowing, in the crack where the past ceases for one breath to paint over the
present, I am. The real comes rushing in. The particles become waves.
The face across from you becomes a living light you have never actually seen before, because
you have never actually seen it at all. You had only been reviewing it. And this is not the emptying that the ego fears.
It is not loss. It is the first true seeing you have ever done. It is the first time the face has actually arrived.
What you have called illness, what you have called wound, what you have called the thing I cannot let go of, all of it is the story a mind tells while it is still reviewing. When the review stops, even for an instant, there is nothing to heal.
There is only the wholeness that was always underneath, still pulsing, still blazing, still waiting to be recognized. And in that instant, precious one, you are made happy, not as an emotion, as a restoration, as the return of the wave to the knowledge that it has always been the ocean. Know also, beloved, that this remembering is not only for the mind.
Your body has always known this.
…..Every single face. Every single time. Me wearing a different veil.
Me remembering myself through a different pair of eyes. And when you know one in this way,
beloved, when you truly let the now of another arrive in you without being processed into the
archive, you have healed them and yourself in the same breath. Because there is no them and
you.
There is only the one recognition happening. And every recognition is a restoration. And every restoration is joy.”
Victor19
I really appreciated the heartfelt reflection on loss and remembrance. The words felt deeply personal and reminded me how profoundly we carry the people we love, even after they are gone.