Dealing with loss...........

People talk about closure and in theory, I guess

it sounds okay.

Question remains however, how does one do it?

Get closure, I mean.

The above image is an edited image of someone

who was my closest friend for many years.

His name was Anders, but to me,

he was the man with the golden locks,

the ruby lips, and the bestest jazz guitarist.

While I was in the USA doing the gig of my life,

(music)my best friend drove his car off the road

and up a huge tree and died instantly.

He had just turn 40 years old and for 20 of

those years he had been my best friend.

I, however, did not know about his death until the day

I returned back to Australia from the USA.

When I came back, not only had he already been buried

 but he had been buried in Sweden, not Australia.

Where was I to go and say ''goodbye''?

I was at a loss as what to do with my sorrow.

So I pushed it as far down into the recesses of

my soul as I could and threw myself into music.

Now, in hindsight I have come to understand that I

actually never really dealt with the loss of my friend.

What I did do, was trying to comfort his wife and children, his

friends, and our fellow musicians who had started to call me

the minute I returned to Australia.

Subconsciously perhaps I was ''dealing'' with my own pain

by trying to help others deal with theirs?

I don't know. Perhaps.

We were all missing our friend.

Years later I had the opportunity to visit the place where

he was buried in Stockholm, so I took the opportunity to do so.

Standing in a cemetery and reading his name on a gravestone

was so strange. It just didn't seem real. He was still so very real

and alive in me.

Walking the streets of Stockholm the day after my visit to 

the cemetery I found myself standing at the door of the Jazz

club where we both used to work.

Suddenly memories from our time working in the bar together

 hit me like a wall of water and I felt as if I was

about to drown.

I needed to scream. 

Putting my cupped hands over my mouth,

I finally allowed some of my anger, my sadness,

and my heartache to be released through a

guttural roar.

Returning to Australia after my visit to Sweden,

I discovered that the sadness of losing Anders often 

tended to show up as anger.

I didn't like feeling angry so in desperation

one day I grabbed a carton of eggs from the fridge,

walked out the backdoor of the house and up to the 

nearest large tree.

While yelling at the top of my lungs I launched

one egg at the time.

-I hate that you're dead! I hate that I can't see you anymore!

I hate that you drove off the road! I'm angry with you!!! etc. etc.

Strangely, although it took over a dozen eggs and a

number of times repeating the procedure,

every time I did it, it made me feel better.

Since Anders died, I have lost far too many more

artist/musician friends.

Which brings me back to closure.

-You need closure so that you can move on, is

a very common thing that we say to each other.

Another one is: just let it go.

Personally I've never found neither one of those sayings

particularly helpful, so if you don't mind, I would

like to offer you my version.

I view my friends that have passed on as just

physically unavailable because they are still very

available to me in my memories.

Anytime I want to spend some time with them, I close 

me eyes and bring forth a memory of a time that

I spent with them.

(And in some cases, I just listen to one of the recordings

I'm lucky enough to have made with some of them.)

The essence, the core of us, in my view is not limited 

to or by physics. 

Lucky for us we come equipped with the ability

to revisit experiences and people in our minds

whenever we choose to do so.

Perhaps closure is not so much ''moving on''

or ''letting go'', rather, more so perhaps about

taking our memories of people no

longer with us and ''weaving'' them into

the narrative of our lives.

about the image: a photo edited in Elements