Feeling Grief
This picture is from a mural I happened upon in Vermont.
The words “RESISTANCE of the heart against business as usual” instantly spoke to me of grief. Grief will stop you in your tracks as the world keeps moving around you because it is your heart resisting going about business as usual. The unfairness of it will strike you: my world has been irreversibly altered and nobody else even noticed!
I was at an event recently where there was a moment of silence for a lost loved one and it was truly a second long pause. I was a little shocked it didn’t even last 10 seconds! But we tend to do this with life.
The need to continue participating in this #capitalisthellhole robs us of a chance to truly feel our pain and give it the time it needs to fade. We gotta get back to school or work and continue producing so as to not stop this well-oiled machine that is lubricated with our blood, sweat and tears.
We saw (and continue to see) this play out with the pandemic: the world is grieving en masse but our society, particularly our country, refuses to allow us adequate time to grieve all that we lost: our sense of normalcy, the opportunities lost, our health in some cases, much less the millions of people we lost.
Grief can be so all-encompassing: you can grieve the loss of a relationship, job, death etc.
It can feel like a subtle sting or it can feel like it’ll swallow you whole. People tend to only sympathize if they believe your grief should swallow you whole, if they think that you suffered a loss great enough that it takes a prolonged amount of time to process. If they don’t, they expect you to move on, business as usual. We can see this in frustrated friends that ask “why haven’t you moved on yet” when grieving the loss of a romantic relationship.
I think it is unfair to devalue what we have lost by shoving it to the side and carrying on with life. I view taking the time to grieve as a way to honor the importance of that relationship or dream that you once had.
This past week, I lost my Great Aunt Joyce. She was my Grandpa’s sister on my dad’s side. That said, I did not know her as well as I could have because my family is a lot closer to my mother’s side of the family. But I wanted to share a little bit about her and our relationship because however short it was, it will be missed.
The first time I ever met my Aunt Joyce was at my grandpa’s funeral. She gave me a gold sapphire necklace. Jewelry has always been my love language. She didn’t know that my baby sister was born in September so the gift would have made more sense to give to her. I don’t know why she gave it to me at all. Maybe she saw something in me during our brief encounter at my grandpa’s funeral or maybe she arbitrarily chose me but it made me feel special and cherished.
Every time my sister and I would visit her she’d be so thankful and she’d hand us handfuls of $20 bills. I always wondered why she did that. I hope she knew she was enough and didn’t have to buy our affection.
She never married. She told me that she fell in love once and was wronged and decided she would never trust a man again. “You’re better off,” she insisted when my engagement ended and I truly thought I’d grow up to be just like her. It was a future I didn’t mind envisioning.
She never revealed her age. Which was a problem when I went to visit her in the hospital and didn’t know her birthdate. When I consulted what she put on Facebook the nurse told me that I was off by ten years but that I was close enough.
I spent a couple hours with her that night holding her hand, kissing her forehead, playing in her hair and whispering that she was loved.
She had been declared brain dead but she looked like she was fast asleep and could wake at any moment. I was half worried she would and immediately start berating me for fussing over her. (She was not a touchy-feely person.)
There is so much more to her that I don’t know, and those are now stories I’ll only ever learn from another’s mouth.
We were not particularly close, and even still I feel her loss. The last time I lost an aunt I wasn’t close with, I thought that I wasn’t allowed to grieve because I didn’t know her too well and I suppressed my feelings which led to me getting drunk at a New Year’s Eve party.
I think we, as a community, should learn to show up for one another when we need to take the time to grieve, and the best way that I know how to do that is to relieve their to-do list in some way.
I like to cook a meal or two when I know someone is grieving because I remember when my Nana passed in 2010 and we had people cook meals, not only for my nuclear family, but for my gigantic extended family as well. It made me feel so loved and cared for, and that is a feeling that I do my best to recreate for my loved ones.
I think also coming over to help clean or straighten house or do laundry or the dishes can be very beneficial to the well-being of someone who is grieving.
Expressing sympathies is always a good start, but I hope that culturally, we move past that being the sole response to grief.
Everybody grieves differently. Some like to post about it, some pray about it, some journal about it. Others, it brings out their creativity and they create through it. There are so many ways that people choose to unload their grief. It is in our best interest not to judge people for their method of choice. Someone posting on social media about their loss could be a way of looking for connection in that aftermath.
In my case, I wanted to post because I wanted to take a moment to pause my usual content and share my musings on this topic as I experience it firsthand. I wanted to share a little bit about my aunt with the world she is no longer a part of, in hopes to cause her presence to linger just a bit longer.
No matter your approach to your own grief or to others’, lead with love, lead with kindness, and lead with a willingness to understand. We will all be better for it.
S/O to Anna Hall for editing this post.
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