When death steals the future and you are really floundering
Table of Contents
- Family relationships
- How death steals the future
- Love the best you can.
- If death has you where I am now
- Similiar posts
Family relationships
Death is never welcomed under normal circumstances. And when it's unexpected it's like the rug has been pulled out from under your feet. And especially so when the relationship was fractured. Share on XMy brother died suddenly last Friday from complications of the flu and pneumonia. We were never close, but we also never had even one argument. That’s hard to believe, isn’t it, but it’s true. I was the big sister and always protected him from the trauma we lived in most days, so maybe that was it.
I’m sharing this with you today because I often write about relationships, and family relationships can certainly be complicated. Especially when a member dies. But I want to empathize today about how death steals the future.
How death steals the future
Obviously, I’m not talking about our own deaths, but the death of people close to us. In my case, my brother’s death means there is no chance that we could be closer in the future. That hope is gone.
When my brother and I were caring for my mom in her last years, I thought we had forged a closer relationship. Once she died, my husband and I often reached out to him but our efforts were never reciprocated. A couple of years later, we gave up reaching out. We would still see each other at family functions and were always friendly, hugged, and all that.Never a problem. But not what I wanted. Now, any hope for that is gone.
I wondered what his thoughts were toward me during his week in the hospital. We couldn’t visit him because we didn’t want to be exposed to the flu. We were there the day he was taken to the hospital via ambulance, but we couldn’t talk to him because he was so contagious. But he knew we were there.
His niece told me that her dad never talked to her about our childhood, but he did one day, ever so briefly. I was so comforted to know that he remembered and my niece how I always tried to protect him from the chaos that was our childhood. My heart leaped. I needed to hear that.
Going forward, I’ll cling to the picture of a big sister protecting her little brother. It was nice to know he held that image in his heart. My grandmother had this picture in her home, and I always thought of my brother and me when I looked at it.
It is how I want to remember us.
Love the best you can.
Love the best way you know how, nurturing the connections that lift your spirit and inspire those around you. Give of yourself generously, but don’t give away so much that, in the end, there is nothing left but disappointment and emptiness. It’s important to honor your own needs while caring for others. Remember, even Christ walked away from many who could not comprehend the depth of His love.
Some relationships are what they are.
We beat ourselves up trying to be the one who will revive a relationship, often investing countless hours and emotional energy in hopes of igniting a spark that may have long faded. And very frequently it’s to revive something that was never there, a connection built on illusions rather than reality. It’s easy to fall into the trap of reminiscing about the good times, believing that they are enough to turn things around.
However, the truth is that sometimes we hold on to relationships out of fear of being alone or out of a sense of obligation, rather than a genuine desire for mutual growth and respect.
But for that relationship to be revived itself, the important word is “mutual.”
If death has you where I am now
I hope you’re not.
Grief always brings self-reflection—or at least it should. But it’s not a time to be maudlin and look for guilt that isn’t ours. Let’s take our grief and become better people for it, more loving, forgiving, and kind.
God bless and have a great day.
