My stomach turned, my eyelids opened with haste, my alarm clock showed that it was ten minutes to 3 a.m. Sleepily, I trudged to the bathroom, heaved the emotions within me, and remedied myself on the bathroom floor for the rest of the night; this would be my experience for the following three weeks.
This is grief’s effect on me.
I searched and I search, I tried and I try to wrap my head around it. ‘Ambiguous,’ ‘acute,’ ‘prolonged’ are the descriptors grief is wrapped in but, what is it?
Grief is most widely welcomed as the process that comes with the passing of a loved one. Yet, this grief I experience is different. There was a death, but not that of a person. Does that disqualify it or make it grief any less?
Pasting pieces of clarity collected from time, I create a collage of understanding about this grief. Grief is the process that occupies the space in between our relationship with something that is alive and our peace-filled acceptance of that thing no longer being alive.
Grief comes with the recognition that our relationship to this once life-filled thing is no longer life-giving. The process of grief disrupts us, removing us from the context of our relationship to this thing and allowing us to recognize the nearness in which we previously lived in relationship to it. The process of grief confronts us with both the impact something had on our life and the reality that our attachment to this thing will never be the same.
Grief is the heavy grocery bag weighing on your body as you carry it into the house that is a little more empty and more silent than it was before.
Grief is the absence of the hand that once held yours for so long and the admission that no other hand can take its place the same way.
Grief is the exposure of the pain we feel.
Grief is the ultimate irony.
It is sudden and gradual.
It is expected and yet, never fails to catch us off guard.
It is in the losing and the loss.
As mortal beings, death is the only guaranteed event we can anticipate, yet, grief surprises us and reveals to us parts of ourselves that no level of self-awareness could ever show.
Grief knows no restriction of time. It is not subject to time, it lingers and spills over into our waking hours and our sleeping hours. Grief knows no organization. It isn’t sequential nor can we contain it in distinct silos within ourselves.
Subjectively, grief varies in appearance and severity. Objectively, it undoes parts of us, grounding us in the reminder of how human, how complex, how emotional, and how relational we truly are. Despite our relational nature, we often retreat in our grief. But, is this what honoring it looks like?
To honor our grief requires our capacity to embrace it, to interact with it, to believe that it’s not an end in and of itself but a period of time until we can courageously step forward without the thing we’ve lost and with peace-filled acceptance. This step forward requires stillness and being present with ourselves, first. It requires us to take care of ourselves as we are, not as we once were or where we want to be. We must make room for grief in our lives, bringing it with us, paying attention to it, and talking about it when we feel it’s appropriate. However, we do not remain in the stillness. True of every period of stillness, we are never intended to stay where we are.
We move.
We move forward.
Certainly, we will be changed and the life we once lived will be different, but there is a direction forward in which to move—much like there are promises to believe in, hope to hold on to, comfort to trust in, and people to continue becoming.
Photo by Flora Westbrook