#156 Time dilation

Time is a funny thing. Sometimes a day lasts forever, but six months go by in an eyeblink. And time is not the same for everyone.

Besides being broken, I am also trying to understand about what is going on within me. I am naturally curious, excessively so. The good thing is that I am my own lab experiment. Everywhere I read, it says that losing a partner is one of the worst types of loss. This is not a competition obviously, but l need to understand.

The worst loss I experienced before was the death of my grandfather. Our communication was sparse. Sometimes it was a quick call or a letter sent with my brother. But he was there in my mind all the time.

He died in 2014. I still miss him. This was my first emotional outpouring via writing. In just a few minutes I typed something so profound which surprised me. I still read it from time to time. Life made me so much like him in character, intelligence, skills, fears and mistakes. And I am so proud of that. But then I don’t really feel sad for him for weeks. Janne was there to comfort me.

Losing Janne cannot even compare. It is an exponentially stronger and omnipresent pain that won’t leave my side. I read something last week that explained everything. When there is loss, one goes to the closest person to find comfort. For widowers, that person is the same one we are grieving. It gets worse continuously, particularly if one had a fulfilling relationship with that partner. In computer science, we call this an infinite recursion.

So I have my answer. I also thought of an analogy. Relativity is something hard to grasp, but I heard of the concept of time dilation (you might have heard of the twin paradox or watched Interstellar). If people would travel at a very fast speed relative to Earth, they will age much slower and come back to find out that everyone is much older than them.

My grief for Janne travels at the speed of light. I am that astronaut moving so fast that my grief for her is always alive, eternally present. I feel she just died yesterday. And I know I’m the only one feeling this. Ironically, it feels weirdly special.

My grief is relative, but I’m certain too that my love for Janne was absolute.