I lost someone today

Lost.

A word with many connotations, associated meanings, which has become fairly generic.

Other words have lexical friendships in the form of synonyms, a sort of superior status, where each of them are employed in a specific circumstance, depending on what we convey. Roughly they connect to each other, sister nodes in branches of a semantic trees, hyponyms which assign their classes, show their connections, their hierarchy. Employing the use of one word over another may evoke feelings in the mind of your interlocutor, which imply that you are effervescent, indifferent, outraged. Use can be entirely appropriate to the level of emotion or involvement, or else skewed through hyperbole and purpose of exchange.

That girl over there. I think she looks good. I think she is: awesome, amazing, astonishing, brilliant, mind blowing, outstanding, striking, wonderful..... take your pick or expand the range. Today I feel no different in myself to any other day, I am: average, content, not bad, OK, unchanged... the list goes on. We have adapted to give ourselves choices. For these mundane affairs and expressions, the use of one does have certain limitations that cannot apply to all scenarios, but we almost always have a selection, dependant on style and our exact tailoring t what we want to convey.

But I am neither admiring a pretty girl nor feeling fairly indifferent today as opposed to any other.

Today I am awake at 4:30am. I have had little sleep, though tears wished to induce it. I have had many thoughts of how to convey what my current emotional state is, but ultimately it equates to:

I lost somebody today.

Now if I wanted to be passive or declarative I have a multitude of ways to express this.

Today she died.

Earlier she passed away.

Hours ago, a woman kicked the bucket.

9th September 2012 a lady perished.

The list could go on. When people leave this world they can also croak, expire, pass on, snuff it, depending on our level of closeness and attitude towards their death.

Death is all over the news. We list them out in reels of statistics, leaking from tragedy to tragedy, natural disaster to natural disaster, freak accident to freak accident. We know that it should shock us. Maybe every now and then the total if high enough to bring a lump to the throat, or close enough to our location to make us a little nervous. But usually it passes by with tuts and sighs, moments of silence for those submitted to violence. But ultimately it I the same old spiel that we do every day, when in the company of others. But were that newspaper read or news report heard in the comfort of our own homes when we are alone instead of cafes, newspaper stands and friends' homes, the reality is we would skim read a basic description of the event, catch snippets of detail from radios, and watch television reports mindlessly whilst ironing shirts. We are aware of but outside the situation. Their suffering is not our suffering, their pain is not our pain, their torment does not torment us.

But this time is different.

This passing will not go in newspapers, bar a slip of summary, delegating only 30 words to describe  the life and character of a woman who was defeated in her battle with that word that we all know and hear of, but hope we are the 2 out of 3 that will not have to face it. At least until we are grey and old.

56 years... 56 Springs, Summers, but only 55 Autumns and Winters. There will be no more for her.

That age is no age to die. No age to leave husbands, children, grandchildren and a home that has been carefully made by hand. It is not an age to spend the last months of your life drifting , struggling, lingering. It is however the number she was given, and now that number has been called.

But now I do not know what to say. Usually when we tell and retell a story, we word it differently, to jazz it up for our own entertainment and sanity. But this time, if I don't want to be passive and indifferent, if I want to tell people what I feel has happened to me, I have only one verbal expression which I can think of:

I lost someone today.

I can say she died.

I can say I cried.

I can say how sad I am that she is no longer alive.

But this does not express my connection to her and what has happened to it. No other sister node of lost seems fitting. I have not misplaced her, let her go astray, mislaid her.

I don't want my reporting of this to turn to monotony. Perhaps there are words out there that I have never had to use, because I have until now never know such misfortune. If there are such words, I need to, though wish not, to know them. I haven't the words for this.

I lost someone today.