How do you put a quantifiable measurement around missing someone?
Like - how can you explain just how much you miss them.
Or what it's like to miss them.
Or what it means to miss them.
Or what missing them looks like.
Missing someone is such a weird thing.
Because its missing their physical person and all the things that go with that - the hugging and the physical affection and touch and having someone in bed or the kids having a second parent giving them a kiss goodnight.
But it is also missing what they sound like - their humour, their personality, their conversation.
It's also missing what they did and what they enjoyed - their skills, their passions, their likes and dislikes.
Missing someone is also more than all of those things.
And its completely unquantifiable.
Except you know that you miss them and all that they are. so much. But how much, is SO much?
This week we have felt the giant gaping hole that Pete leaving us has left in many more ways than we expected.
For no apparent reason, but the void of him not being here, and us missing him is enormous at the minute. Cavernous even.
And there is no real way to 'put words around' the feeling other than: "I miss him".
It all came to a head today when a child was watching Stand By Me for school.
We all know the story of the group of boys who find a dead body. We had talked a lot about that. The whole concept of a dead body wasn't new - the kids went and saw Pete at the funeral home for a final farewell.
I know some people can't do that. But when I lost my grandfather when I was a similar age it was actually the best thing I ever did. It took away all the unknown of death. The 'what do they look like' and 'what do they feel like' and 'I never got to say goodbye'.
All of those things became known things then they are dressed and presented - dead - in a coffin. You can stand there for as long as you want and cry and say goodbye. If you need to, you can touch their cheek and know they are dead.
It sounds insanely morbid. But I know this was the right thing to do for the kids. There are no unknowns around a dead body.
So that dead body that features in Stand By Me wasn't the big deal.
But the coming of age classic includes a theme that brought both a child and me unstuck.
It is comes to a head when two characters are talking about how one has lost his older brother and he simply says: I miss him.
In fact, the whole movie has a theme about 'missing' people and what they mean to you.
When I googled it to refresh my memory about it (I mean, we all remember the running along the railway tracks away from the train and the dead body) I realised the entire movie is so much more than I remember now I have this complex emotion of 'missing someone' in my life.
Because grief is framed in many ways online and in Hallmark cards and grief books and all of the things we see and hear around death.
The words about what a loss is, and what loss feels like, and that grief is all the love you had to give to that person with no one to give it to.
But I'm finding that one of the worst aspects of grief - the one where you just miss the person so much - is the hardest to explain, to rationalise, to measure, to undertsand, to comfort,.
Because what you miss is all of the things. Not just the love. Not just the person. Not just their humour. Not just their passion. Not just their hugs. Not any one thing of them.
You just miss them.
And 'missing' is that open ended term that has no boundaries.
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