A little boy died in my hometown last week. He was only thirteen and he shot himself in the head. A little boy killed himself last week. His name was Hunter. He couldn’t see the way out of his situation. He couldn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. He took his own life instead of realizing that he would one day grow up and could get out of the stupid small town he was stuck in. He would not always be drowning in his emotions. He couldn't see that one day it would get better.
I graduated with his sister. I coached his little brother in t-ball. Our mothers used to be very good friends. My father was one of Hunter’s football coaches. I did not know Hunter well. I didn’t coach him. I didn’t graduate with him. All the same, I was cut hard by the news of his death. My heart goes out to his sister and brother. I know how close those siblings were. They were all each other had and now a part of that is missing. I cannot even start to imagine the pain they are going through. I cannot fathom their grief.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines grief as “a deep sadness caused especially by someone’s death.” I have to say, the English language has a strange talent of summing up such a complicated mess of emotion into one word. Grief: a deep sadness caused especially by someone’s death. But is that all grief really is? A deep sadness? Grief is not just sadness. Maybe that’s why there’s five stages to grief. It’s not as simple as can be written up in a dictionary.
There’s five different stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. There are books and books written on the different stages. There are so many studies that have been done on grief. It is truly strange how we have a single word for this complicated emotion and yet we keep poking at it. Why did we not decide to give it a more complex name? If we had named it better, would it be easier to handle? Would grief hurt any less if we had just given it a name that matched its complexity?
If you really want to know what grief is, you cannot look in a dictionary. You cannot look in the thousands of books and studies. Grief is dozens of casseroles sitting on your kitchen counter. No one in your family likes casserole, but your mother is sick and people just keep throwing food at your family. Grief is strangers leaving comments of “I’m sorry for your loss” on a Facebook post about your brother. Grief is a candlelight vigil with a town you didn’t think cared. Grief is real. And it is painful. But I promise you, if you’re reading this and you are grieving, you’ll get through it. There’s an acceptance stage for a reason. It’ll get better, just hang in there.
