With Love & Lex

It’s been 8 months and I’m really not sure how much of this I’ve processed vs. what I’ve buried away. 

7 months before my Aunt’s last days earth-side, she was diagnosed with Leukemia. Just that word brings up a lot of unprocessed emotions because, well… fuck cancer.

I miss her. I miss the version of her that didn’t have a chance to grow old. I miss the version of her that I looked up to as a kid. I miss the version of her that I never got to know. 

Wow– as I’m writing this, I can feel myself acknowledging the emotions I haven’t dealt with yet. 

Cancer stole her away in the most brutal way I could ever imagine. The rollercoaster we felt as a family is nothing compared to what she went through. I won’t go into the details of those seven months, not because they don’t matter, but because they weren’t really hers. They belonged to the fight. To the chemo, the hospital rooms, the pain. She spent those months giving everything she had for the people she loved— putting herself through hell, even though deep down, I think she already knew how it would end.

In the end, I know she is where she is meant to be now. I know that she is safe, and healthy and whole again. I know she is reunited with my Poppop. I know she is watching over us all with a serenity we are yet to know. 

Losing someone you love is never easy. Losing someone you love isn’t something you ever get over. You try to see the bright side of “they’re in a better place now”. You try to stay strong for the people around you. You try to filter your sorrow because you’re not the one going through the worst of it. But grief doesn’t care about logic. It just exists, in whatever way it wants to show up.

Death rattles you. It makes you hyper aware of how fragile life is, how fleeting. It makes you reconsider what the important things are. It makes you want to dig up your whole life and actually make something of it. At least, it did for me. It made me question if I was loving fully, if I was taking care of myself at all, if I was just wasting time. If death was just inevitable and I was wasting my time or if I was not doing enough. It sent me spiraling more times than I can count— questioning how cruel it was that death stole someone so young and so full of life. Someone so purely good.

But it also made me want to be better. Kinder. More present. It made me want to live more for myself, and more for the people around me. It made me want to quit my job and chase something that mattered. It made me question the value of literally everything. And until now, I couldn’t put any of that into words.

It made me realize how terrifying it is to love people. How quickly everything can change. Watching my Grandma lose her daughter, my dad lose his sister, my cousins lose their mother– made me so scared of how short life really is. How does one simultaneously realize the importance of holding your loved ones closely, while also being terrified to let anyone in because it can all be gone in a blink of an eye. These contradicting feelings have plagued me for months. Grief is a sickening and isolating thing. 

Even when you’re surrounded by people who love you, there’s this invisible wall between your world and theirs. You don’t want to burden anyone. You don’t even know what to say.

And sometimes, it just feels easier to carry it alone. But you’re not alone. None of us are. That’s the most human part of grief— it connects us.

If it weren’t for you reading this now, I don’t know if another soul would have ever known how much this really affected me. I’m sure it was clear I was a wreck, but I don’t know if anyone knew how much I didn’t sleep, or how my anxious thoughts played on a loop 24/7, or that I questioned every little aspect of my own life because of how… trivial everything felt. 

And then, it hits me how beautiful death might be. How my aunt is on another plane of existence where she is free. She sends us signs that she is okay. She sends us signs that she is happy. Maybe life on earth isn’t everything. It’s all we know right now, but this is just a very small spec of our existence. If we see these signs from passed loved ones, that tells me that love knows NO bounds. Love travels across planes to reach us. 

It reminds me that our consciousness is just a small piece of what’s out there. We don’t know what we cannot see, but maybe in some cases, death is a blessing. Life on earth is just a step to the next— a level before our highest selves. 

This is what helps me survive the spiralling thoughts about death. Maybe death just means rebirth. We never truly lose anyone, because their souls are with us forever.

They show up in signs, in memories, in the quiet moments we least expect. Love doesn’t leave; it just transforms.

In the same way I’ll never forget the sound of her last breaths, I’ll also never forget the kind words and stories we all shared when we gathered around remembering her. We laughed more than I thought we would. We cried in that way where your whole chest aches. We held each other. We sat in silence. And in those moments, she didn’t feel gone. She felt everywhere.

That’s the thing about loss— it doesn’t erase someone. It just shifts the way they exist in your life. From physical presence to memory. From a voice you hear, to a feeling in your chest.
But they’re still there.

Grief has taught me that nothing is promised. That people can be gone just like that.

But it’s also taught me how deep love runs. How much we’re capable of feeling.

And maybe that’s the point; we love, and we lose, and we keep loving anyway.

And if you’re grieving too, I hope you feel them close. I hope you feel loved. I hope you can see the beauty in knowing their souls are outgrowing this plane and moving on to the next.

With love,

Alexa