Loving What Was and Is

I am coming to this realization: I still love the person whom I lost through this illness. So thus, are they not lost or really lost, or more lost, or less lost... I don't know. However, I know the love continues, and so I believe there is a congruency of plot through the life of the ill person. There is something that holds it all together, that makes sense of it, that makes it less dissonant, or at least explains the dissonance of the break between who was and who is and how I relate to them. Now I am not certain of that plot, but I believe it may lay as follows:
The person whom I knew, who convinced me of what was, was in fact a sort of construction of the person already uncertain of themselves during a very difficult upbringing.
I was a sort of anchor of meaning and personality during this difficult psychological time for her.
There was a lot of borrowing of self between me and her; she borrowed a great deal from me, claiming ownership of it.
Despite all of this, we loved each other as sisters and siblings; however, she was disturbed and unhappy in the extreme.
Through her break, which she seemed to somewhat anticipate as her fear that she was going to 'disappear' and her congruent desire to do so, she didn't really change, but each splinter of self she had unsuredly developed was magnified and refracted back on itself until it was unbearable to live in a world that was not absolutely static and supported a fragile and constructed truth of never-ending sameness.
My presence is painful because it was most loved and trusted. Now it is most abhorred because it fractures a fragile reality. But I believe she loves me still, as I love her, because we are family, we were close sisters, and friends. We cared for one another - we care still.
Thoughts for the day...