When Someone You Love Dies

Tom Nickel
6 min readJul 22, 2020

Especially now.

Especially when people are so busy protecting themselves or denying the need to protect themselves, no one even cares about one little death in a world where everything feels like it’s dying.

How is anything ever going to matter again when the one person who mattered more than anyone or anything is just gone. Maybe because of the Coronavirus and maybe something else, because that still happens too.

You can’t even have a Funeral, but you can do something. You do it. Then that’s over.

Then what?

She came to our Death Q & A gathering today and said all that. An avatar named Lilith.

She asked first if it was OK to say her husband just died and then the sadness and disbelief came out as she started saying all the important things she didn’t know what to do about next.

Grief was in every word but her voice was clear, not flat, alive and hurt and most of all not knowing.

When she stopped and it was now time for someone else to say something, she had already told us what needed to be said. She told us so many things about him in her outpouring of love and appreciation for who her husband was.

Heart emojis were flying up for everyone. Other people were softly saying, I’m sorry.

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Tom Nickel

Learning Technologist focusing on VR, Video, and Mortality … producer of Less Than One Minute and 360 degree videos