Grief as a lifelong friend
We’re always letting go and moving on…
Fall always brings with it the physical representation of letting go. What does it teach us? The leaves are changing color from vibrant green to comfortable and warm red, orange, yellow. We watch as they fall from the branches, decorating the cold earth until taken away. We’re letting go of the year and transitioning into a new one come January. It comes year after year, the season of letting go.
Cyclical as the seasons, so are transitions and phases in life. I’ve written about our constant relationship with grief previously and have lived separate encounters with grief since. My stance is: we’re always grieving something. Grief of life playing out differently than our imagination; the cognitive dissonance searing our minds. Grief of a relationship’s honeymoon phase ending; the real and alive work beginning of what it means for two flawed and respectively broken humans, coming together trying to create art. Grief of a new mother’s body; her new vessel understandably hard to accept or reconcile from the way it previously looked and felt. The grief of a longstanding friendship going through an ebb rather than a flow until it ultimately leaves our life completely.
I think of how we often do not know what to tell one another. In our separate encounters with grief, we greet one another’s sadness with platitudes: “You’ll get through this,” “let me know if you need anything,” “you’re resilient and strong, this too shall pass.” I’m a repeat offender of these sayings. We just don’t know what the fuck to say.
I think back on a family member’s divorce, or a friend’s loss in their family, the breaking of hearts which I had no clue how to help or hold or handle. I did the best I could, and no one asked the world of me. No one asked me to hold their heart and stitch it back with my own hands. They wanted and asked for so little.
It would behoove each of us, to have more open and honest conversations on how we’d like our sadness, grief, or devastation to be handled. How can we hold space for one another? Maybe we don’t talk at all. I’d like to offer alternatives: let’s go into a field and scream as loud as we can at how wretched the situation is. Let’s go on a friend date and speak about anything but the problem. Let me order your favorite food and we can watch a crappy reality TV show, to get your mind off it. Or, if you’d like to be left alone, that’s okay too.
We’re all trying our best to handle one another’s tough moments and offer support. Aside from my previous confession in not knowing what to say, there have been so many times where I just didn’t know what to do. And looking back, I could’ve done so much more to demonstrate love and presence. Or better yet, to give someone their ultimate space and not ask for anything in return. My own anxious-avoidant attachment getting in the way.
I think what I’ve found is, we might not always be okay. And that, ironically, is okay. If you’ve lost the love of your life, or experienced an insurmountable trauma, how can you be “okay?” I think, what can definitely happen, is growing into a newer and different version of yourself. One who lives side by side with said grief and is okay with that. But recovery may not be 100%, it may just be a new way of life.
My current griefs of letting go of friendships, or grieving the way my life once was, is a mixture of so many different emotions: sadness, regret, gratitude, peace, confusion. The days where I woke up late on a Saturday morning alone in Brooklyn, as the sun swam through my curtains, cars honking outside, knowing the day was mine and mine alone. Knowing I needn’t answer to anyone. That was a past life. It’s okay to still miss it sometimes, while also knowing they were days I wished away at the time — a humorous contradiction.
I’ve been learning about different types of grief. Griefs I’ve felt and experienced, but didn’t know there were names for: disenfranchised grief, ambiguous grief, secondary loss, cumulative loss, nonfinite grief etc. The types of grief I can now name for myself, are the ambiguous and nonfinite ones. Those have been in my life for over a year now. It’s been tough but something I’m getting through every day in a conscious way, and I’m proud of myself for that.
Grief is a lifelong friend. It is the friend we may not want to open our doors to so willingly. It may not be a friend we want to get cocktails with, or sit at home on our couch, happy to catch up. It’s not a friend we want to greet warmly in any sense. Yet, it’s a friend we need to make peace with. A friend who calls unexpectedly, reminding us the seasons are changing, and that we too, will change with it; whether we like it or not. It’s a friend who comes around, very very often and in very sneaky ways.
I don’t have any answers. The ways I’m getting through my own griefs are writing letters I’ll never send, participating in therapy, using affirmations, calling a friend when need be, sitting in stillness, lighting a candle, moving my body in joyful ways. I’m learning more of how to speak to others through their grief, how to communicate with friends when they’re suffering even if it has nothing to do with a particular grief. I’m learning to just listen, hear, and talk less.
We can all stand to expand our communicative knowledge a bit more, and then a bit more. Grief is an inevitable part of life, it’s side by side and cyclical, just like the seasons. It’s hidden and overt. It’s loud in its undertones. But if we can hold its hand, it can also show us a way towards conscious living.
