Between my sore throat and my feverish delusions throughout the days and three years after of losing my husband and boyfriend of 11 years on a plane crash, I came to the conclusion that there is life after death—of a loved one.

There is life because it does not stop.

This is the way for the cosmos, time and space to show us how incredibly small we are, how incredibly insignificant we are in this great Universe created randomly—which some call “the miracle of creation.”

When we lose a loved one, we feel like time stops.

But the only thing that stops is our inner clock, and we lock ourselves in a bubble in which we try to keep everything exactly the same with the hope that the loved one will someday come back and find everything as he left it.

A time comes when the bubble bursts, and reality touches us and we realize that the world kept turning; the president was involved in another scandal, the tree in my backyard blossomed with beautiful yellow flowers and the cat gave birth (again) while I stayed—self-trapped—in my bubble.

Also, another question bubbled up: Can a heart broken by the greatest loss learn to love again?

Yes, it can.

The amount of love you are capable of giving does not change, only the quality of that love changes. It remains latent, it becomes mature and wiser, more cautious.

Yet, the heart is there waiting, looking, searching.

It is a magnificent thing about humans and our ability to adapt to all, even the greatest pain, the pain of losing a loved one. It never goes away yet we learn to live with it, we adapt to their presence and their sporadic raids.

In the book Man’s Search for Meaning, the author Victor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist, was taken to a concentration camp used to study why some survived and why others decided to end their lives. He came to the conclusion that you can take everything away from a human being—all loved ones, freedom and the last vestige of dignity, but the only thing they can not take away from a human being is the freedom to decide how to react to a specific situation.

That is, we do not control anything, only our reaction to certain circumstances.

The author also quotes Nietzshe when he says, “He who has a why to live, can endure any how.”

In my case, I decided that my tragedy would not dictate the pace of my life.

Yes, I changed, of course. It made ​​me grow and question my faith until I finally lost it. When melancholy or pain attacks, my heart, magical beings like my mom, dad, aunts, brothers, beautiful nieces and wonderful friends appear and pick me up from the darkness and bring me back to the light.

At least for me, there is life after death. But here, now, in this crazy and cruel world, if you look carefully there is more beauty than the most elaborate fiction. And sometimes in the silence, if we listen carefully, perhaps the loved one who is gone can whisper something like, “Honey, please do not adopt anymore cats…”

Please let me be clear that I am not trying to tell anyone how to deal with the loss of a loved one. I have learned that this is a very personal, very intimate path that we have to walk (sometimes) alone. I just hope that the outcomes of my experience may help someone out there to regain a little bit of hope.

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Apprentice Editor: Jessica Sandhu / Editor: Emily Bartran

Photo: Sonny Abesamis/Flickr