The Way We Grieve is complicated.
It's hard to know how loss will hit you, how it will affect every single day of your life until you lose someone that was a part of your every single day. Time sort of becomes a vacuum and it sucks you into this weird hollow space. You can see life going on all around you but it's almost like you're stuck in the in-between. The sounds are a bit muted; the light isn't as bright, and you're caught somewhere between what's going on in your head and faking almost every step you take. Because life doesn't stop. It doesn't slow down, and you have to keep going.
You start to despise everyone around you who doesn't see or understand what's going on in your head and your heart. You start to fantasize about going back in time, paying a bit more attention to all the little, tiny details of the person you're missing. You ache for the days that you never had to hurt like you hurt right now. You pay attention to how insignificant things are that you used to worry about. The perspective in some ways feels really good and in other ways is lackluster.
Grief is funny in that way it takes a little piece of you and twists it up and changes you forever. You stop laughing as hard as you used to. You find yourself daydreaming of the person that you're missing, analyzing who you were when you were with that person, how you may have been better to that person how that person maybe could have been better to you. It's a land of what ifs and if you're not careful you'll spiral even deeper into the abyss.
And the people closest to you, if they aren't careful, you start to resent them a little bit. Friends that you were so sure would show up in your life are mostly absent besides a text or two, and people you never even knew cared that much keep checking in and it's a bizarre sort of amplification of what you thought you had and what you never knew you had in some people. Some people will tell you to get over it and they can't understand why your grief might get a lot worse before it gets better. People that have gone through a loss as big as yours will tell you to ignore those kinds of people and you'll appreciate that very much.
Your sorrow and tears will turn into anger at one point. That's completely normal. You will have this deep-seated anger and resentment and a lot of times it will just come up out of nowhere it sits in your stomach, and it burns. If you're like me and you like to torture yourself a lot, you'll beat yourself up even more wondering why you can't just have gratitude for the person getting to be a part of your life for this many years. It's sort of neat, feeling anger and being disgusted with yourself all at the same time. And when you're angry, hearing people say you should “really go talk to somebody", stings just a little bit more.
Because I shouldn't “go talk to somebody”. Not just yet anyway, because it's normal to feel what I'm feeling and to step through what I'm feeling and it's normal to be heartbroken and to need time and to need quiet. But in a world that never stops, shared with people that have busy lives, people just don't have time to deal with your grief or time to give you 20 minutes to talk or an evening to go out to dinner to listen. It's an inconvenience. But you're not an inconvenience... you're going through it. You had a major life loss, and your life will never be the same and navigating that, yes, maybe eventually you will need to go talk to somebody. But for a little while, just let yourself feel the way that you're going to feel and understand that's completely OK.
And let's be honest right now. You can't stand anybody, and you can't stand yourself. You're shit company and you can't think straight, and you sit around at a table of small talk and you want to pull your fucking eyes out. And you know that. You're at least self-aware enough to know how vacant you are, and you certainly don't want to put that on anyone else. So you self-isolate. You sit at home, and you walk around, and you wonder what to do and you wonder if your life will ever be fun again or if you will ever feel truly happy again. And people tell you, it will be. You will find that lost happiness again. It will take a year, it will take two years, it will take five years… but eventually life will feel right again. So, you count on your fingers, and you do the timeline and you think...fuck.
No one ever tells you how hard it will be watching your loved ones grieve. As hard as it is to feel the feelings you're having it's immensely worse watching people you love, knowing how bad they hurt. It's funny the things that you don't think of if you've never been through it before. I could have never guessed how my heart would ache for my father and how gut wrenching it would be watching him step through what would absolutely be the biggest loss of his life. Losing his forever person so unexpectedly, so quickly, was a nightmare. And witnessing him standing in the aftermath of loss and trying to navigate his way back to some semblance of normalcy is a second layer of grief no one really talks about much. That will also change you as a person.
And you'll focus on the strangest memories at first. It's usually not the good ones. My mom suddenly lost a lot of her right sided movement. I keep picturing her laying in the hospital bed for her third stay after her second bad stroke as she tried to grab the water bottle my dad was holding. She would get so angry at him as she tried so hard to move her fingers and grip. I fixate on what it must have felt like for her. I can't imagine how scared she must have been. To wake up one day and know, just know that your life was probably going to come to an end much sooner than later. And then hearing a doctor say, “if you're lucky you might have four months to live”. And being in pain constantly. Because let's be honest it's not just the absence of the person that we ache for. So many times, It's what we watch them go through leading up to that loss. The torture of watching your best friend, mother, father, child, brother, sister, slowly have the light sucked out of their eyes and knowing there's not a fucking thing you can do about it. The months you spent trapped with a false hope things may get better. This may not be your story, if it is I am so sorry. It traumatic as fuck, and I see you.
And grief isn't linear. You don't start at one point and end at the other side of it having resolved all your feelings and your issues. Grief is complicated, it's layered. You think you're through one part and you move on to feeling numb and then you bounce back to despair and then you jump back into anger. There are times you feel as though you're going insane you feel like you can't trust yourself. You get weirdly comfortable with breaking down into tears at completely random moments that make no sense to you much less anyone else. You smell a smell, you hear a sound, you listen to a song that comes on the radio, and you just fucking lose it. No warning, no signal that its coming. You just lose it. And just as quickly as it comes it goes and you might even be laughing or snickering at a joke. But you're also thinking wow I've really freakin’ lost it.
Grief is really, really, hard. There is no right way there's no wrong way to feel the way that you're feeling. Your feelings are just that. And as hard as it is you have to feel them. You can stuff it down and you can go numb, and you can step away from all the things that hurt but all that it means is that in one year, in five years, in 10 years you're going to be turning a corner and you're going to stop dead in your tracks. And you're going to be faced with all of the pain and all of the suffering because there's no escaping your healing journey. You can run and hide from it as fast and as long as you want to. But eventually those feelings come to the surface. They might bubble up like yucky goo and ooze through your mouth affecting other relationships and evaporate from your pores in strange ways that affects strange parts of your life in ways that you can't even understand. But that shit is going to need to be processed and no one, no one escapes it. In a world where being unbothered is king, antidepressants rule the world.
My mom went away without a real goodbye. There was a million I love you’s and a million ways that we showed up for each other and a million conversations that I'll cherish for the rest of my life. But there was no proper goodbye, and it will haunt me for the rest of my life. I never got to ask her questions I wanted to ask but never knew at the time. There were no parting words of wisdom but I'm smart enough to know my whole life was filled with wise words from her. The absence of her presence is something that’s going to take a very, very, long time to get over. But I find some comfort in people who have stepped through this before me. People who show up and listen who don't try to tell me how I should feel or what I should be doing but are just present and they're a witness to my pain. There is strength in numbers and while so much of this process happens in the privacy of your own space, we do need people. We need those around us sometimes just to be a witness. We need to know that we can come apart and that people aren't going to walk away. We need people that aren't going to try to talk us out of how we are feeling but are there to just be with us. We need a community that feels safe and warm, a place where its safe and makes sense to come undone and helps to be seen.
This is that place to me, and all are welcome.
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