I've had to take a few day to myself to process what's been going on. One day my aunt was here and the next gone. Last Thursday I received a phone call that after my Aunt Themis's long fight with cancer it was her time to go home. I had planned a trip to surprise my family and was to arrive the next day.
My aunt was a loving and incredibly brave person. She faced adversity with a smile and a hug. I knew she was in pain and that pain was now gone. I still wanted to hug her one more time, wanted to see one of those smiles or hear her laugh, be all together as a family just once more. Since my family was from Venezuela we used to visit them every few months when I was little. When all the political unrest and the divorce hit in 2012 I never went back. I never realized that Christmas in 2011 was the last we would ever have all together. When the majority of my family moved to Miami I didn't visit as often as I would have liked. Family alliances ran deep and at the time I thought nothing of it. It has been 8 years since my family was all together in one place and now it will never happen again.
In all my life I had never had someone in my family (that wasn't a distant relative) pass away. I am blessed to have never experienced this pain, but I wasn't really sure how to feel. I am sad but I experienced it in waves. A lot of the time I was okay but sometimes I cried. I didn't even cry for myself, most of the time I cried for my cousins and my family. I talked my therapist about all these emotions running through me. She told me it was normal, she said it was okay to not be okay and in the same moment it was okay to be okay.
I still came to Miami to celebrate the beautiful life that my aunt had lived. Everyone hugged a little tighter, smiles often seemed a little more forced, and we loved a little more timidly. Loss is a strange thing and we all have our own way to deal with it. At the end of the day we all can only understand our own personal feelings of loss. Whatever we feel is okay and justified in it's own way.
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