The thing about grief is

I've never had much death in my life. Which is fortunate, my life has been filled with life. I've had a few people die within my lifetime, a few family friends and relatives. But even with the deaths of people around me that I wasn't close to, death and loss was always something I never really understood. I could never and still can't properly to this day understand how someone can exist one second and not, the next. I understand the science and the reality of a persons body not pumping blood and oxygen and life into itself anymore, technically I get that. But for someone to just be gone, to have only memories and photos of a person left is strange to me.

The thing about grief is that I'm not sure anyone knows how to approach it. You can't touch it, feel it, bounce it up and down in your hand and get a good look. You can't practice it, practice how you'll feel and how you'll cope. You can't often foresee it or make proper plans surrounding it. It feels as if it's this powerful, dominant thing that can ruin your life. It's a war you cannot prepare for. A natural disaster with no warning. The thing about grief is, I'm not alone in not knowing how to deal with it. Everyone struggles to understand the feeling, to be able to get past it and move on. The thing about grief is it's not a straight line, not one strong continuous feeling that lasts forever. It's a squiggly line, a series of waves of emotion and feeling. When you grieve you can be fine one day and less fine the next. Grief can hit you in the randomest of moments, in moments of happiness and joy, in moments of stress and anger. You can be reminded of it in the least helpful ways at the worst of times. Grief is messier than I believe any other emotion to be. They say it comes in stages, and this comforts us because we think that we can work through these stages like they're bullet points on a to-do list we can tick off, one, by one. but I don't believe such a feeling or emotional upheaval can be so structured. I think, in the simplest of terms, grief is a battle, one that we lose and win every day.

Sometimes I'll feel guilty if I'm in a happy situation, or a good place in my life and I'm not thinking about the grief. I feel guilty when I first wake up and I don't think about it. why am I thinking about other things because nothing can be more important than a person dying. a person being gone. I punish myself and tell myself that I am selfish for thinking of my small, boring stresses and dramas because I am alive and that is lucky. The thing about grief is it makes you think in more detail and more depth about so many things that you'd normally let pass you by. You think about yourself dying and what people will think and say and feel. You think about the people on the bus around you and who they've lost. You think a lot more than usual.

The thing about grief is, it really does come in waves. But you are blindfolded and the waves are coming at you in bursts and differing levels of force. You cant see them on the horizon, you won't hear them building, they just arrive. Sometimes only a small wave, washing at your feet. Small enough to kick away. And sometimes big enough to swallow you.

The thing about grief is there is no right way to do this. There's no right way to feel, our bodies are not used to or meant to feel this empty and confused. No one should tell you that you're not sad enough or that you're too sad. There's nothing anyone can say or do that can really mend a hole that exists within yourself. The way to fix it is through time and love and eventually, you might begin to feel that hole strengthening and decreasing in size. One day you'll feel less hopeless than you feel now. One day you'll feel stronger than you feel now. But the thing about grief is, to get there

all you can do is wake up each morning and try. 


Molly,

xx