Losing Things

WM came yesterday. I haven't seen him for months. He has MS, but a very mild form. His wife died, and he's been grieving. RS has also recently lost his wife. Wife-losing is a very difficult thing. BP just came back down from Ohio, she lost her daughter (esophageal cancer). Daughter-losing is also a difficult thing.
If the bank can take "my house" then it isn't really "my house". It was always the bank's house. They bought it. Their money bought it. I borrowed the money. If I pay off my mortgage or if I buy my house with cash money,then the bank can't take it. Nobody can take it except the government. They can take it with "eminent domain". So even if I "own" it, I only own it provisionally. It is mine as long as the government says it's OK for it to be mine because they don't really need it right now. These days a lot of people are losing "their" house (which wasn't really theirs).
If somone else can take the thing that it is "rightfully" then it isn't really my thing. It's on loan. People are on loan. They can be rightfully taken by nature or God, whatever you want to call it. We forget that. We forget that these people are just a temporary loan. They get taken back. It's so hard because we don't want it to be like that. We want them to be ours because we have no connection to what's not physically here. We don't develop those connections. Then we have too much loneliness.
I can't really imagine getting through days without my wife or my children. I see a lot of people who do it. They really don't know how they're doing it. I think it's important to go through the exercise of reminding ourselves that our people are on temporary loan. It helps to appreciate them while they're here. It helps us to deal with their "loss" better because we know they were never really ours. More importantly, we need to know that when we "had" them we never forgot their value, their impermanence. We do way too much of not being aware of how near death is to all of us. It can be here in a moment.