Grief ‘s Unending Assault, and What We Can Learn from It.
I wanted to write about someone who was very dear to me. I had a friend and he died some time over a year ago. Previously, I’ve written about how much that death impacted me. I find myself thinking about him constantly. No activity can be carried out without him being at the back of my mind.
This is what grief does to us. When someone important to us dies it’s almost as if their death is partly responsible for who we become. I used to see grief as an event. A period that could last from a day to years and one day just end. Slowly, my understanding of grief has evolved. I’ve started to see grief as a parasite instead.
When you first hear the news that someone you loved is now gone it’s shocking. It’s such a shock that many of us feel completely numb when we hear this news. We may cry, but at least in my case, it was more of a forced reaction. It seemed like the right thing to do, and I felt that if I acted the right way then I’d wake up from the nightmare. I waited for a long time to wake up, and the day never came. There is no natural progression for grief because it infects your body and begins to tear at your insides.
How fitting that some of the physical symptoms we feel while grief-stricken include a loss of appetite, nausea, and fatigue. It sucks away all of our energy in an effort to make sure we’re unable to look after ourselves. Grief provides us with the perfect opportunity to dig ourselves a hole and then proceed to lay in it. It’s tempting too right. How is it fair that someone you loved is now gone, and the world hasn’t changed a bit? I think grief is one of the things that perfectly demonstrates that old thing people love to say: the world isn’t fair.
When my friend died someone told me this analogy about grief. He told me to imagine my mental state as a box and inside the box, there exists a ball. This ball is meant to represent grief and every time the ball touches the side of the box it causes pain. He then told me that the size of the ball changes. Generally, it’s large when the loss occurs and over time it shrinks, but that it will never cease to exist.
In the past year, this idea of grief has proven to be true with some complications, but I’d imagine that most of the complications I have come from mental illness such as Borderline Personality Disorder. Regardless of that, I learned how universal grief is in how it targets a person and doesn’t end its assault on that person. I’ve known people who have been completely mentally healthy their whole lives reduced to moments of extreme numbness and panic. I think that death makes a philosopher of us all because we can’t stop thinking about our mortality and the mortality of all of those around us and it can get difficult to focus on anything else.
Even now there are moments when I feel overburdened by his death. I’ll be in a conversation and realize I’m repeating words that were his. I’ll be at the store shopping for groceries and see his favorite snack. In fact, just today I was scrolling through Instagram and he came up as a suggested friend. Having made an Instagram account long after his death, seeing his page in front of me and knowing that nobody was behind it numbed me. It felt as if someone had injected ice into the back of my brain.
For a moment, the only thought I could muster was: “I will never see him again.”
It’s a difficult thought to reconcile.
Grief is a parasite that you can’t get rid of. Its assault on your body, mind, and emotions is so unending that eventually, you forget what it felt like before all this. You just know it was different and I’ve learned the hard way that pining for these older days is not a healthy or sustainable mindset to be in. Instead what I’ve learned is that you have to learn from grief and then use it as an ally. It’s the only way to live a good and full life.
Never for a moment forget that you deserve to live a full life. Everyone has moments when they doubt how much life is worth living, people with mental illness doubly so. We blame ourselves and carry burdens that we shouldn’t have to. It’s an entirely difficult way to live your life.
So what’s the most important thing I want you to learn from grief? Persistence. If grief is always going to be present in your life, then you have to work doubly hard to push back against it. It’s a very simple lesson but in no way does that mean it’s easy.
I think that grief’s greatest trick is in distorting what the future can look like. It becomes just that much easier to think about how meaningless everything is and if we fall into that trap then suddenly the future we’re working for also becomes meaningless. It’s easy to feel trapped when you think that everything you’re doing day in and day out is for nothing. In fact, I can’t think of a more human response to not having meaning. But don’t let grief’s illusion convince you that you don’t have at least some control over.
You have to find meaning. The beauty of believing that everything is meaningless by default means that you can assign meaning to anything that matters to you.
Even with our emotions, we make choices. We’re constantly negotiating with ourselves and we can choose to love and mourn, and remember those who are now gone. After all what choice could require more courage and strength than to live a life worth living despite what we’ve lost. All we have to do is outpace our grief and make small choices each day. Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s all for nothing, because that’s up to you.
