The funny thing about grief is that it does not always go away in a timely fashion. Sometimes it hits you when you least expect it. Sometimes it hits you as you walk back to your room at two in the morning after bringing a friend to the Emergency Room. Sometimes it hits you as summer turns to fall or winter to spring. Sometimes big life moments pass you and grief knocks you in the gutt.
Grief lingers in anger. It lingers in emergency room visits and watching little girls play games with their fathers. It hits you when a child in your classroom loses her father and doesn’t understand he’s not coming back from the hospital. It hits when you see sunflowers and when you hear your mom talk about how in love they were.
Grief likes to sneak in when you’re not thinking about anything related to him. Birthdays, Disney movies, even getting groceries will bring thoughts of him to your mind. Sometimes you think about what he would say about scenarios of your life. You wonder about his sense of humor. You wonder who you’d be if you grew up with him.
Grief is what makes you realize he is the reason you hate people who make promises because he always promised to live until 100. Grief doesn’t follow a timeline you can follow. Losing your dad at five doesn’t mean that fifteen years later, you’re over it. Grief is a process and it’s the thing you always leave out of your life story. This may be because out of the stages of grief, you’ve never quite made it to the acceptance phase. You got stuck somewhere between anger and acceptance and never really bothered to figure out why.
Grief likes to hit you when I think it’s been enough years that you shouldn’t still miss him so intensely. More often than not, the feelings hurt most when you realize you never got the chance to know him. You know he loved you but you’d trade in everything just to have one adult conversation with the man.
Grief is a passenger in your life. It follows you quietly most of the time. You don’t notice that it never quite left you. It’s like the worry stones people carry in their pockets or the small guardian angels people think are supposed to bring them luck. Grief lurks in your skepticism and it disguises itself as sadness sometimes. Grief is something you never expect to keep coming back. Grief is in the pit of your stomach when you forget him. It’s in the way you hug yourself wearing his old sweatshirts around your room. Grief is embedded in who you are and sometimes it shocks you how little you acknowledge it.
The conclusion you’ve come to about grief is that it’s as much a part of life as joy. It deserves to be felt, to be experienced fully. It deserves to be acknowledged not choked down. Grief is vast and it encompasses so many aspects of your life that you would need more time than one ever has just to disentangle it from your experiences. That’s the beauty in it; it can be acknowledged and experienced without taking away any of the joy in life. When you’re ready, someday you’ll hit that final stage of acceptance.
