People often comment in admiration on the fact that despite all of my hardship and tragedy I have survived and flourished. They think I must be incredibly strong to have made it through everything I have. I'll admit that it has been tough. It is a strange thing to look at a family photo and realize that you are the only one in that photo still alive. It is a lonely thing to realize that the only people to have known you from birth are dead.
A lot of people think that in order to survive tragedy and suffering, you need the love of others. If you have the love of others, they will support you and carry you through rough times. But this cannot be the key to survival; my sister had the love of myself and my half-sister, as well as her friends. There was no lack of love towards her. Instead I think that the key to survival and happiness is the ability to give love. In my sister's case, there were people she loved, but I think that after my mother's death she could not find someone to love on that level. That is, the level of a best friend and caretaker, which is what my mother was to my sister. I think that it is not any level of strength or endurance that helped me survive, but rather, my ability to love new people in the ways that I needed to and in effect, create a new family for myself.
In moments of tragedy, if you look around you, you will see people reaching out to help you. You will see people who care about you.
These are the people who give you loans even when you can't tell them when you will pay them back.
They are the people who have an open ear and open shoulder when you need to talk. They are the people who, when you mention that your mother was the only person who asked you about your day, takes time out of their schedule each day to ask you how you are doing and how your day was. They are the people who come with you on last minute road trips and don't pressure you to talk about it when you get the call that your sister has died.
They are the people who sit in silence with you when you don't want to talk about it. They are the people that will stand up for you if someone talks bad about you.
They are the people who get together to talk about the tragedy and loss you have experienced together. They are the people who laugh and cry and experience hardship right along side you.
They are the people who encourage you to be silly and ridiculous sometimes, just to experience that blissfully happy side of life.
They are the people who support you when you need them, and they are also the people who tell you that you don't need support, that you have been through hell and back again and that you will survive this.
These people will enter and leave your life as the years pass, but they will always leave an impression on your life. They can be your family, if you let them. If you allow yourself to love them, they will change your life. They have changed my life, in ways that I can never fully understand or describe. I am left in awe at the debt I owe each and every one of these people for coming into my life and being the family that I needed to survive. The key to survival and to happiness is to love and let love. Happiness is not real unless shared.
