Grief Musing
Grieving is hard, rarely linear, and shows up in the most unexpected ways.
Like yesterday. It was my dad’s birthday party. My brothers and I were all there. I did my best to cook some nice food and take care of the cleaning so my dad didn’t have to. My dad had his friends over but it felt a little hollow for me. This was the first of my father’s birthdays that I was around for since my mom died; the last 2 I was stuck in England because of COVID.
And I just… missed her. I just missed my mom.
It’s hard to be ✨grateful ✨when you’ve sat at the bottom of your life and looked up. To see that there’s only darkness whether you look up or down, left or right. I know nobody wants to be around you when you’re so far under the water and you just feel crushed by the weight of even just basic responsibilities.
But it’s also the worst advice to give someone when they feel like they’ve lost everything. Not only because it feels so inauthentic, but because it invalidates the depth and breadth of one’s grief and emotions. It feels like you’re being told that there’s something wrong with you for feeling as sad as you do, and how often you feel the sadness, or that the sadness even crops from time to time.
I’m not a grief counselor or therapist, but I don’t think I need to be one in order to say that grief doesn’t follow rules or societal expectations. Grief has no timeline: Working through your grief and all the other complicated emotions takes longer than anticipated and rarely is it a linear process. Sitting with your grief and giving yourself permission to wallow in it from time to time is an underrated part of the journey.
In my humble opinion.
In the early days after my mom died, I was blindsided by how heavy my emotions were. I knew it would hurt, I knew I would be sad, and I knew it would be difficult to face people. But like, THIS much? Despite working as a nurse for over 10 years and comforting people through their various grief, I felt so unprepared for my own.
I felt very isolated because the person I had always talked to when I was sad or stressed was the person that had just died. The person who would have pulled my family and family friends together in grief was no longer there and we were all just falling apart into our own sadnesses. It felt like if I talked about how much I missed my mom I was just going to burden everyone and anyone.
Not knowing what to do with myself before I returned to the UK, I spent a fair bit of time scrolling YouTube and I came across a video by Megan Devine about grief and how to console a friend. It’s probably been one of the most useful and validating videos to date when I feel sadness creeping in, or when I have found myself consoling others at work or in my personal life with their losses.
It takes a certain amount of self awareness and vulnerability to be able to sit with someone while they’re grieving. Then, of course, it’s more comfortable for those around you to tell you to be ✨grateful✨and ✨be strong ✨ than to sit with you in your grief, not only because grief is uncomfortable but as a grieving person sometimes we don’t even know what we need. Being grateful or having an abundance/positive/[insert adjective of choice here] mindset aren’t pills you can take or switches you can flip that will make everything instantly better and your sadness go away.
It’s a process. There’s a journey involved.
The circumstances surrounding the last 5 years have been particularly turbulent and unstable. There was a lot of grief that had been compounded and I wasn’t able to work through it properly until the last few months. Sure I’ve still gotten up and did what I had to do, but even when I didn’t feel the weight of my situation on a particular day, life didn’t change and it wasn’t any easier to think optimistically about my future.
A lot of people in my life have fallen by the wayside for one reason or another, and everytime it happened I felt like I would start the grieving process all over again. Always 1 step forward and 2 steps back into the sad. I kind of started to think it was my fate to become invisible and die alone.
And then at some point, the dark clouds start to feel like they begin to part. This big, black void doesn’t feel so dark and empty anymore. It’s only when you turn around you see how far you’ve come on this journey, how you’re over the worst of it. I was scared to sit and reflect on this because I had always been afraid that by looking back I would face the losses and they would feel as fresh as the day they happened.
But that was ridiculous to think.
Only when you reflect and recount the steps of your journey through the sadness is when you can be truly grateful because you finally understand that all the bad things that have happened in your life allow you to appreciate all the good things. It’s only then that you realize that bad situations provide you with the opportunity to say “No, this is not how I will be treated.” or “No, I will not be pressured into doing something I don’t want to do.” and allow you to rebuild yourself and your life the way you envision.
And the people that are in your life throughout the grieving process, the ones that don’t judge you when you’re barely holding everything together, and the ones that just let you spill your guts and talk it out, are truly special people. So the last thing you realize on this journey is that if all these bad things didn’t happen, you would never learn who really has your back and who’s really meant to be in your life.
They’re such painful lessons, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.
