The people we carry with us

Annie Qimirpik

There are some people you expect to see forever. You see them around town, talk to them, tease each other, make plans without thinking too much about whether those plans will happen.

Because why wouldn’t they? When you live in a small community, people become part of the landscape of your life. You know where they live; that is their family. You recognize their voice before you see them.

And then suddenly they’re not there anymore.

I think one of the strangest things about grief is how ordinary the world continues to feel.

The sun is still rising. People still go to work. Kids still play outside. Planes come and go.

Life doesn’t stop just because someone you love is no longer living it with you.

That can feel unfair, confusing and sometimes angering.

In a small community, loss is rarely experienced alone. When some dies, their absence can be part of the community itself.

There’s an empty place where they used to sit.

A name that comes up in conversation, a story someone tells, a song that suddenly means something: grief has a strange way of making ordinary things significant.

Sometimes, we talk so much about how someone died that we forget how they lived.

We remember tragedy because it’s the moment that changed everything. But the person was so more than the way we lost them. They were someone’s friend, cousin, child. Someone who made people laugh. Someone who had favourite things, annoying habits, inside jokes, plans and ordinary days that mattered simply because they were theirs.

I think one of the hardest parts of grief: trying to remember a person as a human instead of reducing them to statistics or what their worst day of life was. 

That’s why we tell stories. We tell the funny ones; we repeat the things they used to say. We name our children after them to carry their legacy. We remember the little details that probably seemed meaningless at the time. We keep photos, visit familiar places to remember them. Sometimes a person can be present in a story without being identified. A memory doesn’t always need a name attached to matter.

There are people I carry with me who will never know how often I think about them.

There are moments I wish I could go back to, so I could pay more attention. I would listen longer, laugh harder. I would take ordinary moments more seriously because we never know which ordinary moment will become a memory. Grief doesn’t get smaller; we grow around it.

We learn how to carry it alongside everything else: our jobs, our families, friendships, celebrations, our ordinary Tuesday afternoons. 

And sometimes, something catches us completely off-guard. A place, colour, song, a joke. A date on a calendar.

And suddenly, for a moment, that person doesn’t feel like someone who’s gone. They feel close again. Maybe that’s what it means to remember someone.

Not to keep ourselves trapped in the past, it’s to allow the people we’ve loved to remain part of who we become. And we can carry them forward.

Perhaps that is one of the quiet responsibilities of being left behind: to remember they were here, that they mattered, that they were loved and that their life was more than the way it ended.

We carry around pieces of them for the rest of our lives.