Grief,  Poetry

Moments in Grief

Everyone has an opinion on how you should grieve, it seems
Even those who have never grieved themselves.

Either you are too devastated and you need to cheer up, get a grip and get back to it or you are too happy and moving on too fast, so your person must not have meant that much to you.

Social media is stupid because a paragraph or a picture posted is such a tiny glimpse into our actual, real and tangible lives and yet it ends up representing the whole of us. A happy moment captured is a very real, yet perhaps brief, moment in time surrounded by many other more complex moments. A smiling snapshot doesn’t show the tears later that night. But those happy moments bring hope, so I hold onto and share them. A sad moment expressed – dark poetry, vulnerability, admitting to depression – is not always a reason for worry, a problem to be fixed, or a request for advice or solutions. Waves of despair wash over from time to time and need to be fully and freely felt.

Going through grief can feel like living in a fish bowl. Suddenly the world is watching your journey and commenting publicly or privately on it; holding you accountable to what they imagine grief healing might look like. Most often comparing your real lived experience to an entirely fictional situation.

It’s important to me that my grieving honors the one I’ve lost – but that’s between me and them. I will continue to live unapologetically. I live and love and grieve for me and my person. No one else.

Sometimes grief looks like calling out of work because you were awake all night with nightmares.

There are moments where grief looks like sharing a laugh with someone dear, discovering there is still room left in your heart to love and feel.

Sometimes grief looks like breaking down into sobs at a memory, a sound, a smell. Hopeless, lost, broken.

Some days grief looks like plunging into an ice cold waterfall, shrieking and laughing at little pockets of joy discovered and beauty celebrated. Intentionally chasing the goodness in the world, because if you don’t go looking for it, you start to wonder if it’s there at all. Maybe you’ll catch a tone of their voice in the splashing waves, a glimpse of their eyes in the sky, their soft embrace in the breeze, feel them smiling down on you from the trees.

Every facet of grief is equally valid and important. The rise and fall of breath, the ebb and flow of tide. Coming and going, sorrow and joy. Everything in it’s time.

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