7 Things I've Learned About Grief in 15 Years
A post that took me months to click publish.
This post was originally written pre-emptively, before the 15th anniversary of the passing of my father. Through the last fifteen years, I have seen the highest highs and the lowest lows in all facets of my life. I’ve learned and loved and lost, and the breakthroughs and lessons that have meant the most to me feel imperative to pass along to you.
Your brain will work nights, weekends, and overtime to keep you from feeling how you felt when you experienced the loss you’re grieving, and sometimes it is completely unbeknownst to you that’s it’s even at work. I cannot even begin to explain how many times in my life in the last 15 years I unknowingly avoiding an experience, a person, or feeling a certain way because my brain was working so hard to protect me.
Unraveling the brain’s habit of self-protection is gutwrenching, empowering, and the most important work you’ll ever do. As you are able, do your best to fight against your brain and sit in the sadness and the discomfort and the pain. It is so important in order to move through the initial, most raw, most painful parts of loss.
People will say to you “it’ll get easier” and the truth is it won’t. But you will get better at coexisting with your grief.
There are still moments where it feels insurmountable and I feel angry and heartbroken, but that is normal. It’s normal because as your life progresses, you’re presented with new life milestones and experiences and the absence of that person will feel present in that new experience.
You can over-schedule, over-book, over-extend yourself as long and as much as you see fit. You can work 27 jobs, over-eat, medicate with any kind of vice, live at the gym, spend hours on the treadmill and your grief will still be there at the end of the race with open arms waiting for you at the end of the race.
No sane person ever hopes someone will spend their lives mourning the loss of them. Create community, stand up for yourself, date, get your heart broken, try again, go to therapy, get your heart rate up, have hard conversations, support your friends, have calm and present eating occasions, travel, laugh so hard you have tears streaming down your face. The best thing that you can do to honor the person you lost is to pursue your dreams and live a full, beautiful life.
Every year feels different. I have had days where I don’t want to get out of bed, days where I feel nothing at all, days where I feel like biting everyone’s head off who has a Dad still picking up the phone. Take each year as it comes, there is no right answer.
I sometimes think about what I would tell the eighteen year old whose life was in pieces around her if I were given the chance and the truth is: nothing. I think I’d just hug her until the walls she’d built started to crack. The rest would come in time. If you’re in any phase of this journey, take it one day at a time. Don’t believe your thoughts — they’ll change — and lean on the people who love you. The only way out is through.
xx,
KDC.
Kelliann
Very brave and hard. Knowing we never lose the grief, the sense of loss, but that it transforms us. I am an Orthodox Christian, and I have to look at it in the light of my relationship to Christ. The comfort I can gain is that of the Spirit who is our comforter. That we don’t travel this world alone, but is with us, even when it is difficult.
I don’t know where you are at in your life’s journey and I am not here to judge, but I pray that the Spirit of God becomes your Comforter. May you enter the rest someday where every tear will be wiped away.