All about Grief.
Dear reader,
Without a deeper sense of purpose other than the simple act of sharing, I wanted to write something brief about loss. Relatively brief and relatively about loss, I guess. Since I don’t claim ownership over either of these terms. It’s been on my mind lately. How love and loss often go together — how bittersweet they are. How the meaning of one changes the other.
What I’ve come to understand is that loss orbits around change, which in many ways adds to life. Ironic, isn’t it? It makes everything different. It makes everything new. Loss changes your understanding of concepts that were comfortable and familiar. You feel like a child again, rediscovering the world around you, never knowing what you’re about to encounter. It walks hand in hand with fear, excitement, appreciation, and ignorance. That’s my observation. You’re free to disagree.
It’s a crazy place to be. I feel like everything around me is foreign all of a sudden. How can something that’s gone affect everything that’s present? How can something be with me at all times if I’ve lost it? I think that’s why people call it haunting, and that’s why they call you ghosts. What I disagree with is placing those terms in the past. Ghosts and haunts are present. It’s the things they represent that now belong to the past. Claiming what’s present in the “past” is nothing other than denial. Welcome to the first stage of grief. You might stay here for a while.
I want to come back to something I’ve mentioned before: bittersweet. The bitter part, I believe to be obvious. Bitter is missing. Bitter is losing. The sweet lies in the memories, in the newfound appreciation for things that went blindly omitted. Sweet appreciation that you’re bitter about gaining too late. Sweet memories cut with the bitterness of not being able to create anymore. Bitterness of the finite; sweetness in the knowledge that what’s happened will last forever. Bitterness of anger — in more than one way. Anger over injustice. On one hand, anger at the end, on the other hand, anger at the sheer fact that it ever began. Knowing what you lost is what makes it so hard, isn’t it? And yet, there is sweetness in the nostalgia — gratitude over having something that is hard to lose. If it wasn’t, would it be a bitter loss in the first place?
Missing you is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. It hides behind the joy of moments spent together. It taints forever. To be honest it became my forever. When you see a future, everything seems fleeting. Nothing is stable apart from the uncertainty. Losing you gave me certainty I’ve never wanted to gain. I’m now certain of a forever I don’t want. A forever heaviness. A double edged sword: I don’t want to feel like this forever, I don’t want it to disappear either. Since it’s all I have left of you. The only thing you left behind. A sadness that I never want to heal from — because it’s inside, that lies the joy of us together. I don’t want to find out if one exists without the other.
You make everything complicated. Joy sad. Sadness heartwarming. Anger soft. Peace uneasy. Nothing is clean cut anymore. No one ever prepares you for this. Loss. Or rather the pain of it. I’m not sure anyone really could, even if they tried. It casts a shadow over everything you’ve come to know. While that shadow slowly disperses, I’m not sure what the world will look like once it does. In many ways, it feels like that shadow disappears into the future — everything that happens from this point forward will carry it inside one way or another. The past on the other hand, gets saturated. As if the future gave some of its colour back. It comes to life again because it stands on its own now. And whether it’s tainted with sadness or pain, you’re grateful that it’s there.
Now, life feels like an endless back and forth. A conversation with myself. Maybe it doesn’t matter — what is right or wrong. What things mean, what words we pin to them in hopes of defining feelings that aren’t meant to be defined. Limited. They’re fleeting; living a life of their own. Ironically, completely separated from us, our decisions, our hopes and wants. None of that matters. None of that will change the “now,” and fighting it, is futile. The way I see it: what’s “now” is decided by what has happened (I know that’s not a particularly groundbreaking thought but bear with me.) It’s all a big “action-reaction” mechanism. So once the action part ie. the past, is in fact in the past, how are we expected to change the reaction part? The reaction will naturally ensue, and the domino pieces will set themselves down in any way they deem appropriate. However, our reaction to the metaphorical reaction… that, we can control. So of course, disagreeing is allowed. That’s a reaction to what’s happening. You can disagree with the now. You can hate it. You can be angry, sad, happy, anything goes. You can react. But you will not change the thing that you are reacting to. So bargain all you want, but make sure you bargain with the right things. Scream, cry, make peace with things. Regardless of what that might look like.
I used to see meaning in everything, and like to think that I still do, but finding meaning in your passing is something that I’ll never be able to do. Instead of meaning, I’ve been finding anger lately. This is not something I say lightly. I haven’t really felt anger. Ever, I’d say. I used to say “I don’t get angry often.” Now, I can with certainty say that I’ve never gotten angry before. It was never anger. I didn’t know anger until 126 days ago*. Everything happens for a reason? I don’t see the reason. Surely, it’s somewhere out there. It’s ominous and beyond my understanding. But, I don’t think it hides somewhere and that one of those days I’m going to stumble onto it. Not in this case. I just don’t see it. And that’s where I touch on the nothingness of it all. I think that loss makes you question everything around you. Every statement that held absolute truth before is now fragile and shaken. It become bland, unsure, ambiguous. You’re certain that it lost the meaning it used to hold and embody. Loss introduces hesitation. Hesitation and indifference. Hesitation, indifference and passivity. I’d also add detachment to that list. You remember all those things you used to think and believe, but now it’s like perceiving them from afar. They’re not within your reach anymore. Their meaning escaped you somehow. Now you’re just staying still, watching loss get only further away from you. Along with a skewed, now outdated perception of the world around you. Slightly depressing isn’t it?
Lastly, I don’t think I’m quite there with acceptance. Not enough to say something even insightful-adjacent about it – I would be speaking out of my ass, so I’ll just sit this one out. If anyone has got that one down, I’d appreciate any advice. I think part of this process is being patient with it. Being patient with the journey. Being patient with yourself. Being patient with getting accustomed to how your reality looks like now, because whether you want it or not, it has just been altered. This is your “now” now, so take your time and build around it however you feel is right. Otherwise, that house of cards will fall right down on you.
*460 at the time of submission, which I think deserves an update. I still don’t have acceptance mastered in the conventional sense. However, I think I learned to live without it. I learned to appreciate your ghost – it feels like I have you by my side, just in a different form. It’s an adjustment, but it’s one that I worked hard to make in order to keep you in my life. I refuse to let myself get lost in grief. To let myself forget you because it might feel lighter. I would rather see you in every ray of sunshine, sound of music, bitter tears and joyful laughter. Ghosts might have negative connotations but not anymore. Thank you for changing my understanding of this word. I will settle for the ghost, it’s okay.