We all are victims of the human condition. We cannot avoid grave consequences. Life can tear our hearts apart.

Divorce ends what once was the happiest wedding day ever seen. The loss of a job that used to pay for a high quality of lifestyle leaves bills that cannot being paid.

Of course, there are calamities that are far worse.

Every day we are reminded how cruel and temporary life can be. Our spouses die and leave us in a state of terrible loneliness. Mothers and fathers bury their children, leaving a terrible grief that cannot be described in words.

We wonder how life goes on for the father who finds his son hanging from a beam in the garage, or a young woman who weeps over her best friend she found dead from a drug overdose. Death bites down hard upon our very souls.

I had known an elderly woman who had lived longer than both of her sons, who died from cancer.

“You don’t ever get over your grief, but you have to get through it,” she told me. “The hard truth is that the dead is for the dead and the living is for the living. Carry a suitcase full of good memories of your loved ones who have passed. Your life to them no longer has meaning, but their lives to us still mean everything.”

There are millions of these stories and millions more about other tragedies that send us spiraling to the very bottom of emotional despair that freezes our hearts within blocks of ice that never seem to melt. We are left to wonder how anyone who goes through such misfortunes is able to rise every morning to face a new day.

Last week, I came across a poetic message on Facebook and it was ironically titled, “The Hard Truth.”

If you wait until you feel better to start living,

You might be waiting forever

Go live your life

Do it sad

Do it anxious

Do it uncertain

Because healing doesn’t always come

Before the experience

Sometimes the experience

Is what heals you.

I thought awhile about what the writer had meant by the word, “experience.” The dictionary defines the word as “an encounter, an event, or an occurrence.” Experiences happen to us every day, whether we want them to or not, and we have to give both mental and physical attention to them. It’s within our day-to-day experiences that our loved ones who have passed away remain alive to us.

I have lived to an age when many people who used to be in my circle of life have died, family and friends whom I have loved with all my being. I am the only surviving member of my nuclear family. Dad died when I was 19. Mom made it through 30 years of depression and alcoholism until she was 75. One of my sisters died at 66, the other died 11 years ago at age 65. Since I’ve lived permanently in Pennsylvania, my best fishing buddy has died, so has a close friend who with me watched both of our sons playing baseball together for years, and four boyhood friends of mine from New Jersey.

I have grieved each loss to tears, and when I actually started to feel myself again, I felt guilty as if I should be grieving longer. Then a sort of spiritual epiphany happened. My loss became my find when I thought about the words, “the experience will heal you.”

When I’m struggling with a decision to make, I talk to my dad. When I get a hug, I can feel the ones Mom used to give me when I was 5 years old. If I laugh, sometimes it’s with my older sister’s sense of humor. When I need advice, I ask my younger sister. When I have flashbacks of my childhood, my boys are always having fun with me.

Since death can never destroy love, our loved ones who have passed away live on forever inside our thoughts and throughout our daily experiences.

Nature reminds us about life and death, too.

The universe mirrors our human condition. The black of night is our darkness, our grief and our failures. The stark, cold winter and its heavy gray clouds, blustery winds and frozen precipitation represents our periods of sadness and depression. The winter turns into the warmth of spring, and the emerging green landscape invites us to lift our spirits. Summer is the season of the child inside us. We feel young again. Our minds travel back to days of our youth when we played baseball games, jumped rope, and rode our bikes down dusty trails.

After the loss of a family member or a close friend, you stare out the window at an early spring storm that pelts the ground with slashes of a cold, driving rain. You might be inclined to think that the persistence of the bleak weather will stay permanently inside your heart.

But that will never be so. Every storm runs out of rain, and the sun will rise again.

Email Rich Strack at richiesadie11@gmail.com