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Michael Colon found there were five things he had to remember as he let go of the trauma of losing his brother and discovered a new life .
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I grew up in a small town called Leroy. When I was eleven years old, my brother drowned at the local YMCA. He was only fifteen.
This tragedy drastically changed my entire life, my world as I knew it was turned upside down. When something like that happens to you at such a young age, it’s as if someone has blotted out the sun. You search for hope and for something that will lift your spirits, but you don’t find it.
You find a pain that you never knew you could handle, a pain you never thought would happen to you. Yet here it is, standing at your front door.
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What you find is something more tragic; you find something that will never leave you. You find a pain that you never knew you could handle, a pain you never thought would happen to you. Yet here it is, standing at your front door. The weeks after my brother passed away were filled with chaos. You receive letters from people you’ve never heard of; you meet people who have no words for you.
The weeks went by and the letters slowed down; the months went by and people stopped losing words for me. Then the years went by and next thing you know, it’s as if it never happened. Everyone else moved and started their lives, but I was still holding on.
There is no book that can teach you how to deal with grief, no manual on how to properly get over the loss of someone so close to you. My life went on, I made it out of high school and I was on my way to the real world. I was excited for everything, excited to move out of Leroy, excited to start a brand new life, leave all the old wounds behind me.
I noticed something as I started my new life — I was still in Leroy.
I was still there, maybe not physically, but emotionally and spiritually I was there. I wasn’t allowing myself to move forward, I refused to let go of that place and what had happened to my family. How could I? Losing my brother defined my entire life. That was my story and I was sticking to it. How could I wipe the slate clean from my mind and begin again?
Dealing with pains of the past is along the same lines discovering as discovering a cut or scratch somewhere on your body that you weren’t aware of.
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It dawned on me one day, that I had to let go. At least physically I had let go of Leroy. By moving out and starting my new life. Yet, something was still off. Something kept playing over and over again in the back of my mind. It was the classic tale of the boy running away from home, hoping and dreaming of a new life and never looking back. The only problem with that story is that we all know how it ends. The boy runs away, tries to begin his new life only to find that the things he was trying to run from are still with him. The boy returns home to face his demons and his past, and it is only by doing so that the boy can finally move on from his old wounds.
Dealing with pains of the past is along the same lines discovering as discovering a cut or scratch somewhere on your body that you weren’t aware of. Since you didn’t know it was there, it didn’t hurt you, but now you’re aware of it, so now something must be done, it can no longer be ignored.
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Most people are not very good at letting go. Visit any airport and watch the couple that has to say goodbye, even if it’s for a week — they still can’t let go. The mother who just gave birth to her baby has to let the doctor examine her child to make sure the baby’s healthy. She can’t let go, even though she knows that the doctor means no harm toward her child and, in fact, is doing it to make sure the baby is OK. She’s still so reluctant to let go. She is reluctant to let go out of fear. She thinks, “What if the doctor drops my baby? What if the doctor finds something wrong?” All these thoughts race through her head. But what if she just changed her way of thinking? What if she thought, “I don’t want to hand over my baby, but I will so I can make sure that if there is something wrong, we will do whatever it takes to make it better?”
I finally came to a place in my life and I decided to let go of my past, to let go of my brother.
Letting go of my brother was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I wasn’t forgetting about my brother, I was letting go. There’s a difference. My brother had a huge impact on my life. I could never forget him.
I started to see a different person, a person who wasn’t letting a tragedy define his life, a person who wasn’t scared of relationships or intimacy.
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The reality is that my brother is no longer alive and I needed to let him go and accept that. When I started letting go of my brother, I started noticing something. I was starting to find out who I really was. I started to see a different person, a person who wasn’t letting a tragedy define his life, a person who wasn’t scared of relationships or intimacy. A person who wasn’t living in the past and using it as an excuse to never truly succeed in any area of his life. Leroy started to slowly become a distant memory to me. I finally started to see the world around me.
Letting go is difficult. Remembering these 5 things helps me move forward on a daily basis.
1) Embrace change, Society would not be where it is today without change.
2) Practice honesty, if you can’t be honest with people, why would you be with yourself?
3) Everything has an expiration date, knowing this will make it easier to let go
4) Embrace the pain, you will feel it, but that’s perfectly okay.
5) Fear nothing, you will always feel fear, it’s moving on despite the feat that makes us stronger.
This is not a “foolproof” plan on how to move on from tragedy in your life. This is how I did it and I hope in some way it can help you move on from whatever you feel is holding you back. Letting go and moving forward was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made. Yet as I sit here writing this, I can’t imagine where I would be in my life had I decided to continue holding on.
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Photo: Getty Images