As soon as I heard that line in TV show a few weeks ago I knew I was going to write about it.
It’s similar to a line I heard in SATC that went: “If you love someone and you break up, where does the love go?”
I’ve often wondered about that in the relationship sense but when Phoebe Waller-Bridge said it in reference to death in the TV show, Fleabag, it resonated with me on a whole other level.
It is true.
When someone you love dies there are several feelings you can’t explain
People probably think that they can imagine every feeling someone who’s lost a loved one feels but they can’t
I think even the person who’s experienced the loss can’t always explain what they feel
The first person that described loss as leaving a huge space in your heart couldn’t have described it better
Let me break down how I interpreted what phoebe said.
First, here’s a snippet of exactly how she said it:
For context, ‘Fleabag’ is Phoebe and ‘Boo’ is her best friend. They had just come out of Phoebe’s mum’s funeral. So the “her” being referred to in the dialogue is Phoebe’s mum.
By the way, Boo’s response is a whole other depth I can’t get into in this post. (Maybe some other time)
Anyway back to my breakdown:
So you love someone, and I mean really love someone and then they disappear from your life forever (death)
You know you are never going to see them again on earth
You know that is it
And you think to yourself “How can all the love I have for this person be useless?”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you stop loving a person simply because they physically stop existing
But there is a difference between the love that exists on earth, and the love that carries on after a person is gone
A lot of thoughts go through your mind when you lose a person
I remember my first thought when I lost someone I loved, it was in response to someone telling me “it’s okay” while I wept
It was “How can it be okay?”
I said the words out and I also meant it deeply from the bottom of my heart
Because I genuinely wondered how it could ever be okay
Back to love:
The first year after I lost someone I loved I prayed almost every night to see my loved one in a dream just so I could speak to them because like Phoebe said , I didn’t know what to do with it, all the love I had for them
It wasn’t transferrable
It was like having a truckload full of outdated currency
It wasn’t convertible
It didn’t seem so at the time anyway
Maybe because I really didn’t want to convert it
It was heavy
But I also couldn’t drop it
I didn’t want to drop it
I wanted to keep it
I wanted so badly to believe that I would still need it
But somewhere in my heart I knew I couldn’t use it
It wasn’t like the love was going to stop
But I needed new currency
I needed the type of currency that could work outside the land of the living
But I also didn’t want to accept that the exchange needed to happen
So I prayed desperately for those dreams with my loved one
God was kind, he answered me more often than I imagined
But still there was a huge difference
I think at some point my loved one started to withdraw
They wanted me to know that I needed to make the exchange
They wanted me to know that the currency I had was outdated and it was going to stay that way for a very long time
It was a hard reality
Still hard till this day
It was hard to make the exchange
But slowly, I began making the exchange
I exchanged it for grit
I exchanged it for resilience
I exchanged it for gratitude
I exchanged it for memory
I exchanged it for more love
But between me and you, I still have some of the outdated currency; secretly hoping to still use it someday
Remembering…
ishappinesshereyet 