How to deal with loss?

This year has been a bitch...mind my words. I have been dealing with loss, over loss, over loss. True to be told, I have had it good compared with those who lost more than I did. First, my best friend was taken by complications after a brain tumor surgery. After that, I had to move out of a house I loved because I had racist roommates, around the same time, the person who stood by me when my friend died went away and never contacted me again and, later on, I lost my 26 year old cousin to a car accident.

People say "count your blessings, but here I am today, writing to get some sense of understading, of resignation towards everything that has been shaking my world non stop. Yesterday would have been my best friend's birthday, today my cousin's. Life is full of coincidences, isn't it?

So...I went to mass today and asked for them or to them, not really sure what it was. I miss my best friend and I am terribly sorry about my young, fun and loving cousin. And here is the sick thing. I am also terribly sorry for me. I am ok, I smile, I sing, I work, I play guitar and go to friend's gatherings, but in the back of my mind there is this incomplete passage, a yearning to be in a place where they're still here. Where I am still in my old home, where no one left.

I wish I would stop listening to my best friend's voice messages, or reading my cousin's boyfriend facebook page. I wish I would stop reminding myself that I have no idea what to do or how to deal with this, but that at some point I have to. How do we heal? I wonder how can we ever overcome loss that big, the knowledge that the person you chose and by whom you were chosen to see the good, the bad and the ugly, has left for good. How does this miracle happen, in which we become resilient to the pain, to the emptiness that settles in the soul after one, and two, and three....