Yesterday, I sat on a patch of grass across the street from the University of Washington Emergency Room and cried. Honestly, I don’t know why. I have a parent whose slew of medical conditions keep them moving in and out of the hospital on a regular basis, and I’ve taken them there enough times that the routine is normalized. I have been doing it as long as I remember.

This is why the tears surprised me. Their pain, anger, incoherence, confusion – I’ve seen it before. What made this moment different from all the others?

All juniors in my high school took a class called Commitment in Adult Relationships, or CAR for short. Looking back, it was among my most practical classes, the lessons of which have stuck with me for far longer than significance of the rhyme scheme in John Donne’s poetry, or intricacies of the Kreb’s Cycle. It was, more than anything, a class about being human in it’s practical, physical sense. There was sex ed, and what a healthy relationship looks like. We learned about our bodies, hormone cycles, and also how to use I-statements and the importance of good communication (“it’s not about what I said, it’s about what you heard”). Among all these things and, scariest to me, we also learned The Steps of The Grieving Process.

This was not my forte. It still is not my forte. Later that same year, all juniors went on a retreat called Kairos. At some point I wrote in a journal, “I am not good at the grieving process.”

For curiosity’s sake, I tried remembering the steps:

1. Denial

Okay. Good work, me.

There are more steps, five in total. Or seven. I’m fairly confident that Acceptance is one of them, and maybe Anger, but I know that for most of my life I never bothered with any of those, and started and stopped at one.

Like a gym bag full of sweaty tournament clothes, I find it less painful to bury the bag under my bed forever than unpack all the smelly, muddy, sweat-soaked and grass-stained clothes. I do not like doing laundry.

Unfortunately, eventually, days or years later, I am going to be asked to get that jersey out again, and it is still going to be a painful, aromatic process, since I have only delayed the necessary washing. Gross clothes do not get any less gross when unattended. (Hey, I never promised good metaphors – just accurate ones.)

I do not believe I am alone in my admission of “not good at grieving,” and, really, it is not anybody’s forte. Someday, I’ll write more on our normalization of behaviors that aren’t healthy for humans, our marginalization and misunderstanding of grief in particular, but for now, suffice it to say, there are numerable reasons why grief, whatever its cause, is never easy. One, if that the cause of grief can be continuous; there is no closure, no finite understanding, no closed window of time in which loss began and ended.

This is, I believe, what caught me up with me. The immense stretch of promised ambiguity and continuation, a void that guarantees healing but doesn’t guarantee healed because “getting better” is never a fixed destination. It is a cycle of temporary fixes and good days, and backwards slides to darker places, in which you can only hope that the regression is only two steps back for every one step forward.

Some loss is like that. And in those moments, sometimes all you can do is go through. Someone interviewed on Humans of New York said this first, but when a wave comes – go deep. If you try to go over you’ll be knocked to the ground, but if you go deep and dive through it, you’ll make it out the other side.

This past winter, I read a quotation that paraphrases as: “But the process is through. Not around, not by, but through.”

It was about allyship, and the continual fight against oppressive forces, but it applies to processing difficulty as well. Right now, the process is through. The passage is through, to nowhere but onward. Sometimes, all you can do is lean into the pain, and eventually, if even temporarily, you move forward.