Losing Them Twice

The pain over all I've lost over the years. Not one loss — all of them. Layers upon layers, seasons stacked one atop another, until you forget what it feels like to walk without carrying stones.

Relationships that haunt me. My parents. My brother and sister. Friendships broken by offense or distance. These are the losses I feel most — not because they're gone, but because they're gone while still here. The ache isn't absence. It's emptiness. It's memories that never were. It's the versions of myself I had to grieve because they needed someone I couldn't be, or someone I wasn't allowed to be.

The dreams. I wanted to be a singer. I believed that about myself once — that I had something to offer, something to sing into the world. The woman who once believed her voice mattered learnt to question whether anyone wanted to hear it because nobody whispered that she was good enough. There was no encouragement. No affirmations. Just the cumulative silence of not being seen, not being believed in, not being told that her voice — or anything else about her — mattered. I have carried that lie ever since, watching the dream die not from circumstance, but from the weight of her own smallness. Somewhere along the way, the song became quieter. Perhaps I became quieter too. There is grief in that. Not merely for the dream, but for the girl who once dared to have it.

There are parts of myself I have had to release. The innocence of a childhood I never had. The girl who thought family meant safety. The woman who believed her voice mattered. She had to die so I could survive.

Perhaps some of the deepest grief is not only mourning other people. Sometimes we mourn ourselves. We mourn the child who should have been protected. The girl who should have been free to laugh loudly, sing boldly, cry without shame, and grow without learning how to disappear. We mourn the woman she might have become if survival had not demanded so much of her. There are no graves for those versions of ourselves either. Yet we know where they are buried.

The people I've loved and lost. Not just this year, though Oom Leon's death opened something — something deeper, something older. Something that apparently had been waiting beneath the numbness for permission to hurt. That is the cruellest loss — the ones you had to say goodbye to twice. Oma Agnes, Oma Else, Opa Manfred, Walter, Opa Heinz, Manni, Aunty Delice, Anne, Bernadine, Liz, Paps, Marion, Oupa and Ouma Deysel. I carry them like a genealogy of ache.

The first goodbye happened slowly. Distance. Circumstance. Life moving across countries, years and seasons. Then came the second goodbye — the one that made the first permanent. There would be no returning. No catching up. No one-day conversation. No opportunity to rewrite what distance had already taken. Death closed the door that distance had left slightly ajar.

There are seasons that closed without healing, without resolution. What did not get finished? Everything. The conversations never had. The apologies never given. The love never spoken where it might have mattered most. All those sentences suspended somewhere between I wish I had and now I never can. There is no editing some endings. No returning to the page. No knocking on the door. No telephone call that can reach backwards through time. That kind of finality has weight.

Underneath it all is something I am almost frightened to admit: God feels distant. When I needed Him most, when the grief was too big and the numbness too heavy, He felt like He was not there. Or worse, like He was watching from somewhere I could not reach.

I know the Scriptures. I know what they say.

"The LORD is near to those who have a broken heart, and saves such as have a contrite spirit." — Psalm 34:18 (NKJV)

I know that truth. Yet knowing God is near and feeling His nearness are not always the same experience. Perhaps faith sometimes looks like telling God the truth about that distance rather than pretending it does not exist. The Psalms are full of people who loved God enough to ask Him where He was.

"How long, O LORD? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me?" — Psalm 13:1 (NKJV)

David did not lose his faith by asking the question. He brought the question into his faith. Perhaps I can too.

The terror I carry — the real one, the one that keeps the sluice gates locked shut — is this: if I let these tears come, they will never stop. If I open the door to this grief, it will drown me. The ocean is too vast. The losses are too many. The names are too heavy. I am too tired to cry for all of them.

So the gates stay closed. Yet the water keeps rising behind them. Grief keeps pressing. Not violently. Persistently. As though every unwept tear still remembers why it came.

Perhaps I have feared that opening the sluice gates means opening all of them at once. Every person. Every childhood wound. Every broken relationship. Every funeral. Every dream. Every goodbye. Every unfinished conversation. Every version of myself I miss. One enormous ocean demanding to be cried in a single sitting. No wonder I am frightened. No human heart could carry that much grief all at once.

Perhaps God is not asking me to.

Beneath everything else, the grief keeps trying to say something extraordinarily simple: I miss them. Over and over. I miss them. I miss who I was supposed to be. I miss the childhood I did not get. I miss the singer. I miss the sister I could have been. I miss the family that was meant to hold me. I miss them.

Perhaps those are the words the numbness has been guarding all this time. Not explanations. Not theology. Not closure. Just love looking for somewhere to go.

I am afraid — so afraid — that if I finally let myself feel all of it, there will not be anything left of me when the tears are done.

Yet Scripture tells me something tender about tears. God does not despise them. He does not hurry them. He does not stand impatiently waiting for me to pull myself together. He keeps them.

"You number my wanderings; put my tears into Your bottle; are they not in Your book?" — Psalm 56:8 (NKJV)

A God who records tears cannot be indifferent to what caused them. Perhaps I do not have to cry the whole ocean tonight. Perhaps one name is enough. One stone. One memory. One loss. One sentence: I miss you. Tomorrow there may be another.

Healing does not require me to empty the entire reservoir at once. Perhaps the sluice gates can open slowly. Perhaps grief can come in streams rather than floods. Perhaps Holy Spirit knows exactly how much this heart can bear at a time.

Perhaps the woman who remains when the tears finally come will not be less of me. Perhaps she will be more fully me. Not the child who was never hurt. Not the singer who never doubted herself. Not the sister whose family story unfolded differently. Not the woman who never experienced loss. Me. The woman who survived. The woman who remembers. The woman who still loves. The woman whose heart has somehow remained tender enough to miss people after everything. The woman whose tears are finally allowed to tell the truth.

There may be an ocean behind these gates. I do not have to cross it tonight. God can meet me at the water's edge. One tear. One name. One stone at a time.

Perhaps that is enough for today.

Yet even here, standing in the weight of it all — the lump in my throat, the leaky eyes, the fear that the sluice gates will open and never close again — there is something true that holds beneath everything else:

It is well with my soul.

Not because the grief isn't real. Not because the losses won't sting. Not because tomorrow won't bring another wave of missing them.

It is well with my soul because He holds the future.

He holds what I cannot see. He holds what happens after the tears. He holds the woman I will become on the other side of this grief. He holds tomorrow, and the day after, and all the days I don't yet know how to carry.

My heart is heavy. My eyes are leaking. The numbness that has protected me for so long is finally cracking open.

And it is still well.