Please please please Moms & Dads be kind because this might be a weird issue for someone but for me is extremely important.
I’m now estranged from my sibling, I loved her to pieces but at some point she started to treat me seriously badly and after the last disagreement I stopped contacting her to see if she would ever reach out and she never did. All our relationship was based on me taking initiative on everything, from text messages to meeting. I’m heartbroken but I’m coping somewhat.
Now, in my quest to make her reciprocate, I took care to always go visit in her town for her birthdays, child’s birthdays, festivities, bringing gifts etc. Also for my birthday, she never did come for me or anything.
Anyway, I’m an animist and earthquakes are a very important thing to me. Here it is only very rare and very light tremors, nothing dangerous, ever. I felt two in my own life. I never felt the third because I was away going to visit my sibling for her birthday. Basically I took the train and it happened when I was traveling (2.5 hours of travel). I was absolutely devastated. I believe that I knew there was an earthquake coming, so I was waiting for something to happen of course no idea when, but when it happened I was away. For someone who doesn’t love me, on top of that.
But why? Of all the people in the world, I was the only one for whom this mattered. Why me have missed it? This was called the strongest earthquake ever in this area and it will never happen again in my lifetime. I don’t want other earthquakes, I want the one I was waiting for and specifically in my hometown, it was super meaningful to me and I’ve lost it. I never leave the city for any reason, if it wasn’t for her starting a family away and not giving anything in our relationship I would have never been away. Of course she was dismissive when I told her.
I feel so guilty and I would give everything to have been here to feel it, it just hurts enormously. I’ll have to live the rest of my life knowing that I wasn’t living this experience, that meant the world to me.
I’ve lost a lot in life, including one parent to suicide and all my childhood toys and cherished items and pictures, so I’m already numb to pain in a way, but having lost that experience is just something I can’t cope. I want to go back in time and be here. It was the most sacred and meaningful event ever. How can I deal with this?
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Can I tell you about French astronomer Guillaume Le Gentil?
He tried to observe the transit of Venus in the late 18th century for the Royal Academy of Sciences. He went to India (an hefty journey back then) to see the transit in 1761. However, he got held up in Mauritius for a year due to a war between Britain and France; he was blown off course for five weeks by monsoon winds; the place he wanted to go, Pondicherry, was conquered by the British so he could not land there; meaning on the day of the transit he was still at sea and he could not carry out precise measurements. He thus decided to stay in India for eight years so he could measure the next transit of Venus in 1769, but when that transit happened it was cloudy and he could not observe it. The next transit of Venus would not happen for another 100 years.
After this he was in shock for two weeks, almost unable to speak, then he got dysentery (pretty serious back then) which further delayed his journey home. When he finally returned to Paris in October 1771, he’d been away for eleven years and discovered that he had been declared legally dead and been replaced in the Royal Academy of Sciences. His wife had also remarried.
I am terribly sorry that you missed an event that was important and significant. You have every right to be upset and feel gutted about it. For what it’s worth but I totally respect and admire you for trying to doing right thing by your sibling and her children. That’s big of you, responsible of you and kind of you. I hope that one day you will see the value in this.
I hope that you are able to find some sense of solace, a weird sense of reassurance, in the fact that other people have missed important events as well. Somehow we find a way to carry on, and often the universe can really conspire against us and challenge us.
I sincerely hope that you are able to find a way to work with other people in your field on this. Collaborate and be involved in further study around it. You sadly missed an event, that doesn’t mean that you have to miss out on further things involving it. I hope that one day, you are able to travel somewhere and partake in some kind of other study involving earthquakes. Who knows what the future holds.
Above all, I am sorry that you missed something that was important to you. I hope that you are okay and that you are not entirely deflated by this. Please keep your head up and your heart strong. I am sending you big hugs and good vibes. Keep going, keep doing your thing. Keep being your amazing, kick ass self. That is most important.