And she was watching the last of the current season’s auditions this evening; she had previously recorded it so that she could watch it at her leisure, which obviously turned out to be tonight. The last person they auditioned was singing a song he had written for his father, who had died of leukemia. I wasn’t really paying attention to most of the show as I was reading while she watched, but something made me pay attention to this last audition.

What stuck with me about it, was the conversation the judges had with the gentleman who was auditioning after he finished his song. One of the judges, Lionel Richie, was speaking with him. He described the contestant’s story and song as “his ministry”, which I found to be interesting as he didn’t seem to be overly religious. He had been telling the judges about how important his father had been to him, how he was basically his idol in life. His mother was diagnosed with MS in her mid-forties, and his father had stepped up to not just take care of his mother, but also him and his four siblings - often driving 40 miles each way to spend time with his wife daily, all while providing for his family and still being a parent to his children. And then he was diagnosed with leukemia, and then gone.

But what really struck me was how he described his feelings for his deceased father - how much he had meant to him, and how much he still thinks of him.

He said, “I am blessed to hurt this much.”

I have never thought of it that way, but in a way it is a blessing to have cared so much for someone that losing them hurts. I am reminded that pain is a sacred part of existence. Pain does not make us weak—it is a reminder that we are alive, that we feel, that we live fully. Or as the author Penelope Douglas said, “Pain always reminds us that we’re alive. And the fear along with it that we want to stay that way.”

But more importantly, it is a remembrance of just how connected we were to someone we have lost. It was Alfred, Lord Tennyson who wrote,

“I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.”

What most people don’t know, is that he wrote those words as part of an elegy for his Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died of cerebral hemorrhage at the age of twenty-two in 1833, and not as a lament about a lost lover. Even Tennyson knew that he was blessed to hurt so much. As am I.

Absent comrades.