a_lesson_on_grief leif Grief is that shattered-bone feeling that takes hold of your body after the shock of death has left you weakened. It is chills at the base of your neck spreading through your arms and down your spine. It is stomach lurches and holding your breath until gasping. It is raw. More raw than fresh, pavement-scraped knees. More raw than wind-burned face or cold-chapped hands. It is burning like Jupiter storms. But there’s something else. Something more significant about grief than the physical experience of it all. Because eventually you’ve cried a hurricane, and you’ve mourned an apocalypse-worth of death. And after you’ve done that you’re left with faint heart beats desperately pleading with you for answers. Grief is mourning the future. You are trapped in a present filled with absence. And the past infiltrates your senses and the heartache on your mind like ocean on a capsizing boat. Here is where you are: desperately pleading with time to take you in reverse to any point where there was a possibility of future experience with what you lost. Grief is the inability to accept that there will be no more moments. No more memories created. What you have existing within you is now the bound and published copy of your interactions now ceased. I DIDN’T WANT YOUR STORY WITH ME TO BE OVER. That is what grief screams into the ether. Over and over in the ripples of hate and sadness and anger and fear and the longing that is torrents of waves upon you. I DIDN’T APPROVE THIS ENDING. This is what grief drives us to repeat over and over into our author-hearts. Our writer-minds. This is what we learn: we write our stories in the choices we make and the people we love and the lessons we learn, but we do not write the loss the universe deems necessary. That is part of our experience. Grief is the refusal to accept the universe’s role in our lives. We want full authorship of our experience. And. We. Can’t. Have. That. Grief is a human experience. It is stubborn. It is painful. It is honest. It is the purest thing I have ever felt. Ever. And it is humbling. It says, “Something meant so much to you, you would let yourself believe you had the power to prevent yourself from losing it.” And that’s why the tears are instantaneous. Grief is powerful. Let yourself be overwhelmed by the loss. Let yourself be consumed by the sadness. Embrace grief. Because it has a purpose. It has something to teach you. And you won’t always know what that is right away. Maybe you won’t know until you’re 86 years old and you meet your first great grandchild for the first time. Maybe you’ll know 7 months later when you’re putting away a shirt or a mug or a feather that reminds you of a moment from one of those already bound and published books on your grief-shelf. Maybe it will strike you in epiphany. Or maybe in subtlety. And it’s entirely possible that the lesson may go unnoticed. But learning, while known or unknown, still takes place. It will move you where you are going. It will take you to where you are. And it will become a part of your story. And you will grow. You will grow. You will grow. Up. Or down. Or out. Or in. You will be so moved. Here is what I know: I grieved because I loved. Because I still love. I loved and love so much and so deeply. And because I grieved, because I grieve I know the depth of my heart and the universe of my soul. And I am an expanse. I have much to write in this life. But I’m also a character in more books than my own, and I have to be prepared for when those stories end. Because goodbye is the reason we create memory in the first place. Goodbye is the reason love can hold us captivated. Because we know it will come for one or the other. Goodbye is the chance to write love stories of depth and longing and passion and emblazonment because goodbye is the promise we make with the universe. We promise to say goodbye. Grief is our anger at ever having made this promise. And grief is okay. It is where we all find ourselves—on scattered pages in our stories. And we can grieve for sentences or paragraphs or entire chapters. There are no rules for how long we sustain our anger at the promise of goodbye. How else could we prove our love? Other than to grieve upon goodbye. And so, here I am. In grief. In anger. In longing. And when the time is right, I will take a deep and cleansing breath and prepare to continue growing. Until it is my turn to say goodbye in someone else’s story. And I am okay with this. I live with this promise. I love this life. No matter what pain it’s put me through. I have a story I want to write. 130106 ... cooper rasha oh wow! this was beautiful. holy christ. 130107 ... leif Well, thank you. :) 130110 ... unhinged death_dance olga and we buried him close to you and the headstones in that cemetery with our names on it are piling up shambhala_training 130110 ... unhinged i knew i had to go through_not_around so i let myself cry everyday. at first, it was literally painful. but i am thankful i had the time and space to feel how my life, body, motivations, needs had changed after i had to kiss his cold cheek so that my brain couldn't play tricks on me later. i knew if i didn't confirm for myself that he was really gone, he would haunt my dreams. my sisters are my half sisters from my dad's first relationship. they spent most of their childhoods living with their mother and my dad had standard visitation rights for the time (every other weekend and two weeks in the summer) so her whole experience of taking care of our dad while he was dying was totally different than mine. she also takes care of old people as they are dying for a living so i think she has a little too much practice at compartmentalizing. she asked me one night why i thought dad was such a dick as he was dying and told me she wasn't crying. i knew her denial would come back to bite her at some point but i also knew if she didn't want to feel i couldn't make her so i just sent her a sad emoji. recently, she told me about this sad dream she had where she came across our dad all frail and sick and was all upset in the dream and woke up with tears streaming down her face... the body, including the brain, keeps the score 210926 ... e_o_i I feel for you having to comfort and mourn all at once. And it's hard to know how another person will grieve. Someone I know in the artisans club admin recently lost her mother, and she was answering messages and leading a meeting like nothing was wrong. But I'm not close enough to her to see her more private moments. I think you're right, that emotions have to come out somehow. I'm not as mature at dealing with some kinds of emotions - e.g., this weekend, letting my guilt at the past well up again and distract me. And sometimes it's just how people's minds work: mine makes odd emotional associations, gets sentimental sometimes and angry other times. Which is not to say you should manage this on your own just because I think you have a knack for dealing with complex sadness! No no no no. That wouldn't be fair. I mean, my support kind of amounts to "I'm here for you, although here is actually hundreds of miles away!" but it's there. "Here." But here. 210926 ... nr it can show up in the weirdest ways. sometimes your crying is reserved for when you are moved by a tv show. or when you make a mistake with something you never learned in the first place. or when you accidentally pronounce someone's name wrong even though they also pronounce it that way and never corrected you. maybe it forces you to see who you really are and what you really care about. 210926 ... unhinged (even though there's a continent between us, i have greatly appreciated your long_distance support e_o_i thanks so much xxoo) 210926 ... tender square everything being shared here is so heartbreakingly beautiful. pretty sure this inspired me to get out of bed at 2 am and tackle "soul_tired" when i couldn't sleep today. sending love to you all. 210927 ... nr "i'm just constantly low-key sad" 220209 what's it to you? who go blather from