Grief has become a part of me

Grief is exhausting, draining my energy every time it visits, and it doesn’t care if you’re having a good day or a bad day. It doesn’t care if you are busy; it arrives on its own schedule.

Writing about grief can be gruelling, putting pen to paper while my thoughts race. The pen can’t keep up and almost forces me to the keyboard. But I resist. To type defeats the purpose of spilling my emotions onto the page. There is a labour of love in scratching out words and rewriting. When all is said and done, I sit back and feel somewhat unburdened, until it comes again.

We don’t get out of this life unscathed by loss. So, what is the alternative? Do we lie down and wait it out, or do we look it in the eye and dare it to consume us once again?

Whether you’ve lost a person, a pet, a job, or anything that has given meaning to your life, you are, in a sense, lost too. A piece of you is gone, and your whole being morphs into something you don’t recognize.

When my Mother-in-Law passed away after a several-year battle with cancer, I needed to be strong for my husband and his family. In my quiet moments alone, I allowed myself to feel all the emotions. I grieved for the version of my husband that was lost to his own grief.  Over the past year and a half, we have learned to sit with it. Grief never truly leaves; it just decides on its own terms when it will return.

When my best friend passed away recently, cancer again, grief returned with a vengeance. It was a reminder that it wasn’t done with me. You would think practice makes perfect, but grief is never the same way twice.

I wrote and delivered my friend’s eulogy in an almost robotic way, not wanting the grief to overcome the importance of my writing. I wrote as if it were a piece of content for my business newsletter. Only after I read it back did I let the grief in again.

It is a marvel, really, our ability to get through these moments with the strength and resiliency we didn’t realize we had.

Grief doesn’t care, though, how busy you are or where you are.  You can be at a restaurant, the music soft and omnipresent, until a certain song plays. Suddenly, grief is your dinner guest.

Grief has become a part of me. I’m learning how to let it in and sit with it. When I do, I remember the people I’ve lost, the places we’ve been, and smell the air around me as if they brought the grief to remind me that they are here and always will be.

I have learned that two things can be true at once. We can be sad, our thoughts rushing to get to the other side of our sadness. And then we can be happy for the memories and for the grief that remind us that we are loved, and we have loved.