The Weight of Loss

And the responsibility of remembering

Four straight days of rain isn’t necessarily a mood boost, either. When I ask my Washington and Oregon kids how they survive the dreary PNW weather, they say, “Because the intense, unmatched beauty of the good days makes all the bad ones worth it.” My brilliant kids. They get it. <3

I had a doctor’s appointment this week. I’d waited three months for it. Since moving from Florida to Kentucky, I had to re-establish care with a primary care physician, and this was the first appointment I could get. Walking into the office felt like winning the lottery. This appointment was the gateway to a cortisone shot for my thumb, refills of my antidepressant, and an insurance-required therapy referral.

The doctor was incredibly thorough with my health history. She asked all the questions and seemed generally interested in my well-being.

Then she asked about my mental health.

“We ask these questions of all new patients to get a good baseline,” she explained. “I need you to answer on a scale of 1-5. One being never, and five being always.”

And she began.

“Do you feel sad when you wake up in the morning?”

I hesitated. “Four?”

“Do you either sleep too little or too much?”

“Five. But I’m a super sleeper, so that’s nothing extraordinary.”

“Do you ever feel all hope is lost?”

I welled up. It’s been my MO of late. Everything makes me cry. It’s like I’m a walking open wound, and even the slightest breeze can bring me to my knees.

“I am worried about our country,” I said.

The state of our divided, inhumane, and deteriorating nation has been the breaking point for me—the cherry on the ice cream sundae of loss.

I came out in 2016—the first year of the oligarch’s first term, divorced in 2018, survived the global pandemic with everyone else in 2020, lost my beloved mom in 2021, my only sister in 2022. My biological dad died in late 2024, and we just moved my stepfather with Alzheimer’s into an assisted living home. Over the course of those years, I also started and lost a few jobs and moved six times.

It’s a lot.

This past week, I learned that one of my mom’s best friends—a treasured, lifelong family friend—passed away. She was 83, and she’d led an amazing life filled with friends and family and love, but still, she was gone. And I also realized that I had to travel to Indiana for her funeral, that I am the only one left in our original family to honor her and bear witness to her life.

And that realization led to the knowledge that I am the sole torch-bearer for my family of origin now. I am the last witness to their lives; to the intersection of our lives. Others, of course, have their own memories of my mom and my sister, but I am the only one with the memories the three of us once shared. And my memory is iffy at best. It’s a huge responsibility to do all the remembering.

I am afraid I will fail.

And the last thing I ever want to do is fail the ones I love the most.

I wonder what my new doctor thought when I cried in response to her question, when I loaded my own sadness onto her back.

Was she already carrying too much? Did she disagree with me about the state of our country? Did she immediately despise me for the side I revealed myself to be on? Because there isn’t much middle ground any more. Either you fear and loathe what’s happening here, or you support and encourage it. And if you’re in the in-between, that’s even worse. Because indifference is where everything goes to die.

I often joke about inventing a Pain Transference System (PTS), some kind of newfangled device that lets you share just a little bit of your personal physical pain with someone else—not in an attempt to harm, but in an attempt to understand.

Just one small zap of the PTS when your bones creak in the morning, and you can say, “Is this something I should be worried about?” When your new knee aches in the cold and rain, a zap can let you say, “See? This is why I’m so crabby.” We could dispose of the happy-to-sad face charts with the 1-10 pain ratings because we could actually experience someone else’s pain.

The PTS would work, too, for the ache in our hearts. One small zap to another and your can determine if your anguish matches everyone else’s, or if you’re just a human who feels too deeply and carries extra pain weight. Maybe that’s why I eat my way through all my trauma, so I have the corporeal means to carry what I cannot process in my heart and in my head.

Once, I asked my ex-husband how many mornings he woke up feeling sad. He looked at me strangely over his cup of coffee and said, “I never wake up feeling sad.” It was a revelation to me that the heaviness I so often feel isn’t universal.

Maybe I’m just an Enneagram 4 and a Pisces. Perhaps that’s the lethal combination. Maybe my old friend, Effexor, is no longer working the way it should. Or maybe it’s just who I am—someone a little sadder and a little sleepier than the average bear.

It’s so nebulous, this thing called pain.

Perhaps the question shouldn’t be about discovering whether I’m normal or not, but in understanding that we all experience this wicked and wild roller coaster of life in unique and beautiful and devastating ways. Perhaps it’s about finding those who understand that concept on a cellular level and holding them as close as we possibly can. Even while we know in our tender hearts that they are precious and rare and that someday, they will be gone, too.