Hello dear one,
You might be feeling numb right now.
You might be feeling like a jagged crack has broken you in two.
Or you might be feeling as though your entire being is so thoroughly shattered that there is no use picking up the pieces.
I’m not going to tell you that I understand, because I know that I was always infuriated when people told me that.
“No!” I screamedscreamedscreamed in my head, “You don’t f---ing understand!” (As it turns out, having your best friend crushed by a 40,000 pound dump truck at sixteen is a gateway to hard core swearing. Among other things.).
I can’t feel what you are feeling. But I did feel what I felt.
Empty.
A gnawing, writhing emptiness.
An emptiness with substance.
Even now, I’m not sure that I have enough distance and perspective to adequately string the words together to describe this experience. Yet, I’m going to try. For the both of us.
Because life can feel too complicated when you are grieving, I’ll attempt to simplify this: one (mostly) healed girl’s guide to grief.
there is no timeline
Even though it’s been more than six years since the worst day of my life that led to the worst week…month…year… two years…time seemingly amorphous and indefinite…I still spontaneously burst into tears when I am reminded of certain places, songs, times. Sometimes I smell the particular scent of the dryer sheets that she used. Other times, more obvious reasons bring me back; writing this, I am sitting in a lovely little café, trying desperately not to let my tears turn into running lines of eyeliner, dark and ugly as many of my days post car accident.
Darling, there is no timeline. Time doesn’t heal all wounds, but I promise, she eases them. But Time doesn’t hurry; she takes her damn time. Please please please, don’t rush this.
It’s okay to not be okay.
It’s okay to not want to be okay.
It’s okay to use grief as a measure of love.
take care of yourself
Extreme loss tends to bring about extreme behaviors: no showers for weeks vs putting oneself out into the world with a forced determination, consuming only Nutella and sugar cereal vs consuming only air and water, lying in bed all day vs excessive exercise in a quest to burn through your emotions.
Your number one job right now is to take care of your basic needs and perform as much self-care as you can.
Is this overwhelming?
· Start with a shower.
· Is that too much? Take a drink (for goodness sake, of water please!)
· Cook yourself real food, whatever this means for you. Include vegetables. If you can’t muster the energy, order from the healthiest place you can think of. Ask for help with this if you need to.
· Take a walk outside. Breathe. Just breathe.
· Get enough sleep. If you can’t sleep, at least rest.
· Give your mind a break. Meditate. Stare at a wall. Breathe some more.
· Survive. Above all else.
other people won’t understand, and that’s alright;
you might feel like you lose more than one person
Each and every person around you doesn’t to know what to say, how to act.
People are going to say and do a lot of things that they think are helpful. Some things might be nice and useful. Sometimes you just want to throw the damn casserole in their face.
When someone says something insensitive, you are allowed to be angry.
If you are grieving and they are not, they are doing the best that they can to comfort you. None of us know how to deal with this, not really. If you and they have both experienced this loss, then they are likely sinking into their own well of pain. It’s not the same from me to you or you to them. They don’t understand what you are feeling and you don’t understand what they are, not precisely anyhow. Let it be.
When I lost my best friend, I also lost a lot of other friends, not to mention the majority of my acquaintances.
People feel uncomfortable with death; it’s natural to shy away from it.
On top of one devastation, you might have to deal with an avalanche of people sliding away further and further from you. This is a cosmic twist of the knife, I know.
It’s not their fault, or yours. It just happens.
Forgive forgive forgive.
ask for help
Never ever ever feel like a burden. Your loved ones want to help, even if they don’t know how to do it quite right. If you need anything, anything at all, ask for it. Sometimes you don’t know what kind of help you need. Ask for it anyway. You are held and you are loved.
feel your feelings
There is no right way to handle grief. Everyone grieves differently.
However, upending the heaviest rug you can find and stuffing your emotions down and out of sight does no good. Life comes in waves. There are seasons for certain feelings. If right now is a time for gut-sinking, nausea-inducing pain, let it be.
Sob.
Scream.
Throw things.
Break things.
Journal.
Feel it all and feel it now. Whenever now is. Whenever you need to. To be human and alive is to feelfeelfeel.
Saving the pain for later only shoots veins of poison through your life.
it’s okay to cry; it’s okay not to
A lot of people have a preconceived notion of what grief looks like. Toss that in the garbage pail. Rip it up and burn it. Some of us sob until our insides feel as though they are about to be wrenched up and out of us. Some of us stare into space. Some of us try to go about life as normally as possible, though nothing is the same. It’s all okay.
The worst thing you can do is judge yourself for your reaction.
Grief is as uniform as the human race, which is to say, barely at all.
you might get lost in the process
After my soul-sister was killed, I was not the same; how could I be? For a long, long time, these changes were decidedly bad. I didn’t feel as though I knew who I was anymore.
Who am I without you?
Grief oft shatters identity.
If there is one thing I can swear to you, it is that no matter how deep in that fog you find yourself to be, you will not be lost forever.
My darling beautiful human, healing is less like cutting your hair after an awful breakup and more like the gradual process of growing it out again, of finding yourself again.
Restructuring yourself, one piece at a time. At some indeterminate point, I believe, really I do, that we are all going to come out stronger than we were prior to the breaking (http://thegirlbecoming.blogspot.com/2018/07/kintsugi-stronger-and-more-beautiful-in.html).
But it’s okay if you aren’t ready for that.
For years, and sometimes even now, strangely, grief felt like home; I became so familiar with its atmosphere as to become oddly comfortable there.
That’s alright. Stop judging yourself.
Be where you are now.
Be here now.
I’m holding space for you. You are loved.
Love,
Lola
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