Frankly Put: Right Person Wrong time
In 2023, grief and loss came in a shape almost unexpected to me and in this weird way, it hid itself behind other things that made it easier to look in the eye.
It is human to host loss like we host a friend. There is this notion that grief is just love persisting. That there is an affection we fashioned specifically for this one person that no one else can enjoy because it is tailor-made. We hold on to grief for so long sometimes because it takes the shape of the person who is no longer in the room with us. Sometimes, that silhouette is not just love but time, dreams, visions, hopes and plans.
In this life, loss is like change. Although it is inevitable, I don’t think that we are ever quite ready even though we might prepare ourselves for it. That said, we create concepts like “right times” and “wrong times” for things. The idea is that there is a time when a loss would come into life and be welcomed and other times when it would show up only to be rejected. However, one can’t reject it in actuality because it shows up when it wants and however it wants.
Hand in hand with right and wrong times comes the concept of right and wrong people. Somehow the impact of the loss of these people is determined by that adjective before them. Even that is subjective because the wrong for you is the right for someone else. That being the case, we add another layer of time. To expand, that is to say, that someone wrong for you now may be right for you later on and the opposite is true. We selfishly take this opinion and carry it as justification for why we choose to stay or leave… Ahem, guilty.
In that line, we question it a lot of times and we are allowed to because we are exploring our safety, emotionally. There is the wrong person at the wrong time. We agree. There is the right person at the right time. Unequivocally. There is the wrong person at the right time. Hey, character development is knocking and “You needed that”. What about the right person at the wrong time?
We are so quick to label them as logic dictates that if they are the right person at the wrong time, they are the wrong person. What if that is not the case? I know mathematically we say negative plus positive is a negative but I suppose life is trying to teach me how to be a good detective with the way it keeps trying to make me find the blessings in disguise. I’m going to be a little stubborn and hold to the fact that the wrong time does not diminish the right person.
Hear me out, it may help to not villainize the experience. The strongest route I have found to acceptance of a loss has been to genuinely admit to myself just how much that person meant to me. Often I close my eyes and try to convince myself I don’t care in a bid to move on but that’s not what is called for. I know it is easier to hate because a negative perspective allows you to, with a clear conscience, cut off this part of you and leave it in the past.
It is a war with self to separate from that which seems to water the soul but hey, life is not fair. I am not here as a lawyer to try and prove you innocent against life’s unjust hand but maybe the sentence you are accorded can feel a little less bleak. Sometimes, someone is just that. Good. They do not need to be picked apart in search of that negative thing. Don’t get me wrong, people can do bad things and that can make them bad people. (Pause for a dramatic look at the jury) Let’s not try to look for irrational means to award them that title.
For once let’s not look for what we did wrong, let’s not look for what they did wrong. Let’s find the good we did together. Appreciate the people we became in their presence. That’s something we lose in these relationships. The person we are when these people come into our lives, who seems to die in their absence. Maybe they made you more responsible because that is what was demanded of you. Maybe they made you more loose and receptive to life experiences and spontaneity in your addiction to rigidity and routine. Maybe they made you fall in love with the parts of you that you never gave yourself the chance to meet. Maybe they showed you how ready you were for something you didn’t know.
I just realized it is very odd to start the year talking about loss and grief but perhaps I’d shake some thoughts instead of just going with the seasons. Following the theme of the last set on a new perspective on cutting off people, it was something to write about. This pruning that happens, not to the chaff and rotten bits but to the good crop too. We lose the opportunity for connection every time this happens. Losing a possible friend, romantic partner, job community or family… is never easy when they bring so much wealth and abundance to us.
I could just as easily say that perhaps it is a show that we are not ready for the good to come into our lives but that is not always true. Sometimes we are and it is the sole reason why these blessings come into our lives. It is a grey area in human existence that I think I will forever have. I could spend my entire life trying to understand it but it is not for me to understand but just experience it. Any type of remedy is just not able to completely take away this phenomenon. It never erases the fact that some good could be brought together just for a season.
Timing be damned, I am going to carry these good people not as grief but as the best parts of me because I don’t think I want to resign the experience of them to “the right person, wrong timing”… to put it Frankly
