THE PEOPLE WHO ARE MISSING

THOUGHTS OUTSIDE THE OFFICE

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My aunt died this week.

That sentence still does not feel real when I write it. She was my daddy’s baby sister, and then suddenly she was dying, and then she was gone. It happened so fast that I do not think my mind has caught up with what my family has already had to do. We have written the words, made the calls, shared the arrangements, found the photographs, answered the messages, and started preparing to stand in a funeral home and accept condolences for something I am not sure any of us fully understand yet.

There has not been enough time to process any of it. There was barely enough time to understand that she was not going to get better before we had to understand that she was going to die. Now we are supposed to somehow move from shock to grief on a schedule because the obituary has been written and the visitation has a beginning and an ending time. Apparently, death gets to tear straight through a family without warning, but the people left behind still have to know what time to arrive, what clothes to wear, who needs a ride, what needs to be posted, and whether everybody has eaten.

My daddy lost his baby sister. My cousins lost their mother. My uncle lost his wife. My mother lost someone who had been part of our family for most of her life. I lost my aunt, but I am also watching people I love carry losses that are even heavier than mine, and there is not a damn thing I can do to make any of it less brutal. I can write about her. I can help with what needs to be done. I can check on people and try to choose the right words. None of that changes the fact that she is dead and everybody who loved her is now expected to figure out how to live in a world that continued without even pausing long enough for us to catch our breath.

In the middle of all of that, I miss my baby.

She is three, and she wants to be with her daddy. That is not wrong. It is not betrayal, rejection, or some complicated judgment being handed down by a tiny person who still needs help putting on her shoes. She loves her daddy. She misses him. She wants him. I am grateful that she has a father she loves enough to want that badly, and I will never make her feel guilty for loving him simply because I am the one left hurting when she chooses to stay with him.

But understanding it does not make me miss her any less.

I miss the weight of her climbing into my lap without asking whether I am working. I miss her interrupting me with something that is either critically important or complete nonsense and being equally offended if I fail to respond with the appropriate level of concern. I miss the questions, the demands, the mess, the noise, and the tiny voice calling for me from another room as though we live in a house roughly the size of the Louisiana Purchase. I miss being needed in all the exhausting ways that make me fantasize about five uninterrupted minutes when she is here. Now I have the quiet, and I would like to return it.

I hope she wants to come home one day. I know she loves me. My brain can list every reasonable fact available, and not one of those facts can crawl into my bed, take over my pillow, kick me in the ribs, and wake me up at an hour no decent person should be conscious. Reason is doing absolutely nothing for me tonight.

And I miss my husband.

There. I said it, and I do not intend to dress it up until it becomes easier for other people to understand.

I miss him while knowing that missing him does not settle anything between us. It does not rewrite the past, resolve the present, or promise us a future. It does not mean I have forgotten the hurt, abandoned my own needs, or suddenly found a simple answer to problems that were never simple. It means that he was my husband, he is the father of my children, we built a life together, and some part of me still reaches for the person who used to be standing beside me when life became unbearable.

My aunt died, and I miss the person I would once have expected to help me carry that. I miss not having to explain from the beginning why my daddy will not say what he is feeling but I can see it anyway. I miss having someone close enough to understand the history behind the names, the relationships, the stories, and why this loss is not confined to the person who died. Grief does not arrive alone. It drags every other absence into the room with it and then leaves them all sitting there, staring at you.

So I am not only grieving my aunt. I am grieving while my baby is somewhere else because she wants her daddy. I am grieving while missing the man who is with her. I am grieving a death while also grieving a family that is still alive but no longer gathered in one place. And those things are not equal, but they have become tangled together so tightly inside me that I cannot pull on one without feeling all the others.

This week has made me want my family in the most basic, almost childish way. Not a carefully negotiated arrangement. Not a mature conversation about what is healthiest or most practical. Not another plan, schedule, boundary, explanation, or brave decision. I want my aunt alive. I want my daddy not to have lost his little sister. I want my cousins to still have their mother. I want my baby in my arms. I want my husband beside me. I want everyone returned to the places they occupied before life decided to rearrange all of us without permission.

None of that is available to me simply because I want it.

I spend most of my life finding the next thing that can be done. That is how I work, how I parent, how I practice law, and probably how I survive. If there is a problem, I research it. If there is a mess, I start sorting it. If someone needs help, I figure out what comes next. I can make the phone call, write the words, finish the work, handle the emergency, and keep moving long after any sensible person would have sat down.

But there is no task that brings back a dead woman. There is no perfectly written paragraph that removes the pain from my father’s face. There is no argument persuasive enough to make a three-year-old stop wanting her daddy and come take care of her mother’s feelings instead. There is no amount of intelligence, work, love, or sheer stubbornness that can force a marriage, a family, or a life back into the exact shape I want.

That may be what I am fighting hardest tonight: there is nothing for me to fix.

I can only miss them.

I can miss my aunt even though I am still too shocked to understand that she is gone. I can miss my daughter without making her responsible for filling the emptiness in me. I can miss my husband without pretending that longing is the same thing as an answer. I can love all of them without being able to gather them around me, and I can hate that this is where life has placed us.

I am not ending this with a lesson about appreciating people while they are here. I am not going to claim that grief has already taught me something beautiful when I am still angry that it showed up at all. I am certainly not going to wrap this in a bow and announce that I have discovered my own strength. I already know I am strong. I am tired of strength being the consolation prize I receive every time something hurts.

Tonight, I do not want to be impressive, resilient, reasonable, or wise.

I want my aunt back.

I want my baby home.

I miss my husband.

And I am writing because none of that can happen just because I need it to, but the words have to go somewhere.

Judith L. Hampton

Attorney at Law

Hampton Law Firm, LLC

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