Letters to Myself: Entry Seventy-Four
Prompt: What’s something about grief that no one warned me about?
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
A reflection talking about grief. How grief itself changes our perspective and morphs us as we age in time. That death will do that to us, and we can recognize that this is part of the human experience as we age.
Grief is such a strange thing. It is read this way as well in many texts. I don’t think there is a singular experience to it other than it is just strange. I find myself writing this letter after losing someone dear to me; and part of the reason why I chose grief this week as a reminder of why I am writing and why I am continuing to document the days as we move forward in time. But grief is strange; I keep stating this because it allows me to see through all of the complexities of this phenomenon. The experience itself of losing someone and even experiencing the hardship with the people around you who are suffering, you only see the pain and anguish; the despair of what this life even means to be living and pressing onward.
If there is one thing that grief has taught me as I am going through it once again, is that we can’t let death control us so hard; even though that is what grief precisely does. It really knocks you off your feet and you are trying to regain this motion, the habit that you know so well already, and then you try to keep getting up and you just can’t. As if you were ready to be receiving that helping hand in a moments time; when to realize that the hand is just invisible and you allow yourself to believe that help was coming. Grief really makes you think about what matters in your life in the current moment. I have been with loved ones and I see it in their eyes. These moments are that painful reminder that life is so short. We can’t allow those moments to teach us those vital lessons; we need to be celebrating that we get to do this another day. That we have another chance to live out something that our ancestors left us. But maybe that is too ambitious?
And really when I am saying that invisible hand, it really does feel like you are about to come out of it and then something starts playing in your head - a memory, a visual or vision, a sound, a smell or some form of touch of remembrance - all of which sum the human experience, but know that the person you loved is gone from this planet. It happens so fast; it happens in a split second if I am being completely honest. It allows you to see that living in the moment is one of the crucial things you can do for yourself and for your soul. That you can live right now and figure out a way to find beauty in your life whatever that might be.
Grief points out the general feelings of living out the remainder of your life - just live the life you want to live, you have control over your mind and body. That death comes eventually for all of us and we are never going to be ready for it. As the stoics would say, “Memento Mori” - remember you will die; remember your mortality. I talk about this quite a bit because it is in these moments where we are staring at this reminder in the face with our own lives; seeing only the future events left in store for us and what could those even be? But those are just ‘what if’ scenarios; the real testament of grief allows you to recenter and get back to what really matters in your life.
What I find striking in this experience again, and quite chronic when it comes to the state of grieving in my world, is how these reminders allow us to see the things we have left to do. The events, the families, the projects, the traveling - all of which are great and bucket list items we all should be doing right now. We should be gathering all of the information and figuring out what we can do today to make a project come true; to start making the plans of a trip overseas if you are able to find the means for it; to start a new family because you are in a position where you potentially can do so; meeting with friends on a Friday night, the day that is most inconvenient to yourself but you do it anyways. Grief teaches us to be strong and even more courageous than we were before. Death recenters our perspective and we can’t allow it to take over us completely, otherwise we are back to the constant numbing distractions.
Joan Didion talked about grief in her book, “The Year of Magical Thinking” and she describes grief as a place none of us know until we arrive there — and how even our imagined preparation for loss fails to capture the obliterating, dislocating reality of it.
This is not the final time I will experience the grief that I am currently in right now. But I know that the grief I will have after will have a different affect on me. I know that the grief later will be doing stuff to me that the grief right now is teaching me. We are all living in a period where we are experiencing the world from a tiny moment in the timeline of events. We only know so much in the current time that hopefully later we can be prepared for even bigger moments of despair and grief. Because that is the thing no one teaches you about grief - it will always be there and will always come for you. Memento Mori. Keep this reminder forever until the final moments. Appreciate the people you are around; appreciate the family you have living right now and make time to see them; make time for the friends you might see as more than family as well; make the efforts to go out of your way to live a life full of experience; something bigger and beautiful.
Don’t let grief take hold of you; but allow yourself to see this as part of the human experience. It can be a sad time right now, but we have to remember that we only know good from evil, and if we did not have this, we would not know what it was like to have them around before; that this life is meant to show us the positives and negatives; that death is just a moment in time like everything else. Live the life you have always wanted to live.
Main Thought: Grief is a strange phenomenon experience. Be sure, once it comes to you, to be ready to find solace and strangeness; there are thoughts that will come over you and that will consume your vision. However, it is a good thing; reflect on those who you have lost and appreciate the moment right now as we breathe.
This post is part of my "Letters to Myself" series — a weekly free-write blog where I explore personal growth, curiosity, and healing through simple prompts. Sometimes reflective, sometimes fun, but always real. Thank you for being here.
References:
Photo by Kyle Gare
Lewis, C.S. A Grief Observed. Faber & Faber, 1961.
Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. Knopf, 2005.
