I honestly thought I was done with my grief. There were no more tears, so I thought I could wedge my life back into place again. I thought that I had the power to control my grief, that I could decide when it was over, that I could just pick up my shit and carry on. That I was done with it. But it turned out that grief wasn’t done with me.
It was five months after my father had died, almost to the day, and I was totally fed up with myself. I had been trying to get “back on track” with my life, but somehow I just couldn’t. And I was getting angry at myself. Really, really angry. Especially because I had developed a whole stack of unhealthy behaviours and destructive coping mechanisms during the two years that I cared for my father while he was dying of cancer, and even though I was no longer living in those metallic clutches of fear and dread, I just couldn’t shake myself right again.
What the fuck is wrong with me? I kept asking. Why can’t I get my shit together?
My life just didn’t fit anymore
I felt like unseen hands were gripping me tight and holding me back. I felt trapped and stuck and useless. Hollow and wrong. There was a constant, squirming, deeply uncomfortable feeling that my life just didn’t fit anymore, and I was utterly unable to muster even the tiniest bit of enthusiasm for any of the things that I used to fall into with such unfettered joy. This wasn’t the text book definition of depression. As someone who lives with bipolar disorder, I know depression, and I know it well. This was something different.
But still, I thought that because I couldn’t get it together it meant that I was weak, that I had no willpower or self-control. And I so desperately wanted to be okay that I started going all army-commander on myself, bossing myself into tight little corners of form and function in a frenzied attempt to create some kind of order again, something familiar. But no matter what I did, I just would not fit into any of my old boxes.
And that’s when I realised the grief was still there
It was still there. The grief. It had been there all along, holding me tight. It was “that thing” that I had been so blindly pushing back against, not knowing what it was because I so desperately wanted it to be over.
I realised that just because I had decided it was “enough”, that it was time to get over it and get on with my life, to pick up the pieces, to be able to tell my friends and everybody else in my life that I was finally okay, it didn’t mean that it would be so. As much as I wanted to be done with grief, grief was not done with me. And so I turned around and faced it.
Strangely, it was actually a relief, naming the grief, identifying the “enemy”, looking her in the face. And from within that relief, from within that realisation, came the tears again. The tears that I had denied because I was in such a hurry to be okay.
That acknowledgement of my grief actually made me feel better. Suddenly, somehow, like there was some strange alchemy at work, I found myself calmer, stronger, more centred, more capable, more “me” than I had felt in a long, long time. Because I finally acknowledged the whole of me again. All the dark, messy, broken, aching and grieving parts of me.
I finally gave into my grief, fully, and it didn’t shatter me
And so I gave into it, into the grief, and it was okay. I was okay.
It didn’t drown me, it didn’t shatter me into a million jagged pieces. It actually healed me. Released me. Made me feel better. I felt like the world could be okay again … because I had claimed who I was. Which for now, was a woman grieving.
Accepting my grief unlocked not just my sadness, but all my other emotions too. Instead of feeling dead inside, my emotional body awakened again, and alongside the grief and the sadness flowed happiness and love and awe and wonder and peace.
I’m learning, through my psychologist, that you can’t just block out one feeling. When you start to numb or deny, supress, repress, or bury one part, you bury the whole. All of it. Everything. The whole spectrum of emotion. Eventually it all fades.
And when I awakened to one, I awakened to all. I could feel again. The bad and the beautiful.
I felt life again.
Author’s note: In the months that followed this post, I kept getting pulled back into that “why can’t I get my shit together yet?” cycle, but I kept reminding myself that grief takes her own time, that I needed to be patient with myself. And thankfully, my doctor and my psychologist continuously reminded me of the same, saying that it can take up to 18 months for all the “kinks to work themselves out”, sometimes even longer. I can’t tell you how much it helps to have warriors in your corner.
That said, the first anniversary of my father’s death tore me apart. More than I thought it would. That day, I woke up thinking, “One year ago, this is the last day I spent with my dad on this earth.” And that feeling was almost as raw as it was on the day he died, the day left us, and the days that followed that first anniversary wrenched my heart and my soul.
But 290 days after my father had died, I finally accepted that it was over. He was gone. I would never see my dad again. The tears and the sadness still flowed, but alongside that was also peace. And I hope you find yours. Grief has this strange way of changing us, we’re never the same people again. But that doesn’t mean that we’ll never be happy again, or that life can’t be full and beautiful.
Sometimes pain makes the beauty all the more exquisite. I always used to love the poet Kahlil Gibran’s words, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” And never has it been more true than in life after grief.
Healing resources …
One of the things that helped me so much during my grieving journey was a meditation that I found on Insight Timer. “Honouring Grief” by Bethany Auriel-Hagan is a simple, gentle, 16-minute guided meditation that allowed me to sit with my grief for what it was, without trying to change it or erase it or judge it or fix it. Simply to sit with it. It was such a profoundly life-changing experience for me that in later years my distinct memory of that meditation is that I was sitting next to a river, watching the waters of my grief flow by, even though in reality, I was nowhere near a river.
It’s a loving, compassionate meditation that can help you feel understood and safe, to allow yourself to be with what is, and to create space for healing and peace.
