Learning to Live with Grief
For a period of about 7 years in my life, it felt like everyone around me was dying. Pretty much once a year, I lost someone. I would lose my aunt, close friends from high school, a friend in college, my grandma and other family members. I started to think this was just how life was going to be for the rest of my life, and I struggled to understand why this was happening to me. Eventually, the pattern broke (thank God). It has taken the better part of 10 years to learn about my grief and put some tools and practices in place to effectively cope with it. It has been quite a road to walk down. Losing anyone is hard. It doesn’t matter how old they are, how it happens, how close you were, etc. All of it is just hard and it feels unfair. Being around someone one day and then losing them the next day is just shocking to our systems - there is no easy way through it. I’ll say that through all of the deaths I have navigated, some have been tougher on me than others, but nevertheless, all of them were difficult in their own way. The impact of any grief and then the compounded grief of multiple losses in a row is a lot for any person to carry.
The biggest thing that I had to learn to let go of was this idea that I was supposed to be “over it” by now. There are plenty of days that I think about the losses of my friends, my aunt, my grandma, etc. and I just start weeping. It can hit me out of nowhere. There are just some days that the love and sadness I have about the loss of them feels overwhelming. Some days, I intentionally put on music that I know will make me cry or feel more connected to them because I just never want to forget them. It is this very bittersweet thing - wanting to feel connected and let yourself sit in the pain of it all, while simultaneously wanting to be able to function and get through a day.
Learning to live with my grief has shaped my young adult life significantly. In the beginning and early stages of navigating these losses, I felt like everyone around me was processing it easier than I was. I didn’t really know what to do with that. I also began to feel like God had abandoned me. My mind couldn’t wrap itself around the idea that a God who loved me would do this to me and to my friends and family. What I’ve come to learn over time is that God never walked away. God carried me through and has brought me out on the other side. My outlook on life has been completely transformed because of the amount of loss I have navigated. I went through all of the stages of grieving - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. And I’ve gone through all of those stages in cycles over and over and over again. You learn to live with it, but never get over it.
I feel the weight of loss so deeply. When my friends or family members lose someone that is close to them now, or when I read about a tragedy in the world (about people I don’t even know), it pierces my heart so deeply because I know that pain and I suddenly feel it too. For a long time, this felt like a burden. It felt like I couldn’t get through a normal day without feeling so much. Now, I’ve come to realize that feeling the weight of the pain in the world can be a gift. I feel so connected and committed to the people around me because I have learned to live without my people before. I know how precious life is and I don’t take a single second of it for granted. The gift I have to love the people around me is something I am grateful for every single day because I know it can be taken away in an instant.
The tears are beginning to stream again as I sit here and type this. I have so much love for my people - those that are still on this Earth, and those that are now in Heaven. The grief can be overwhelming because I am overwhelmed with love for them.
This quote by Jamie Anderson helped put my grief into perspective for me: “Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
