The Complexities of Grief and Aging
How Processing Trauma Helps You Re-Learn How To Grieve
Tragedy had befallen my small home town in disproportionate doses. When several teenagers were killed in various tragic circumstances in high school the eery echoes of the school hallways were chilling, passing lockers of classmates who failed to show up for class. Just as healthy adolescent laughter returned it was soon sliced by the crackle of the white noise and followed by an unfamiliar tone of a familiar sounding voice.
The first instance of death outside my family brought me the recognition that I was capable of feeling a real, raw, adult empathy inarticulable by books or films. This is a kind of longing which buries itself deep into your stomach as a seed of grief and flourishes into the sincerest of longing that another person’s hurt would soon cease. This experience in its early manifestations as a youth detached from deep personal involvement in tragedy helps to feel deep sorrow for others while functioning psychologically unaffected by the loss. This healthy experiment in grief is a masterclass in empathy, mortality, and acceptance and taught me that the world is real and raw and young people die in tragic, unexpected, and unavoidable circumstances.
The deaths at my high school were not my first experiences with grief. My seemingly idyllic childhood was marred by losing a young cousin with Rett Syndrome and two beloved grandparents. These encounters occurred much younger than what most parents would like for their children. They happened younger than most of my friends’ first experiences with death. But the childhood rationalization of death is perhaps the most healthy, in that you have yet to develop the darkness that accompanies ones’ imagination with grief which develops in adulthood.
When my father died going into my final year of high school I had been operating under the impression that my early expressions of grief would bring with them an immunity to the cruelness of life. I told myself that if I could handle the quantity of loss I had experienced as a child I could handle the totality of loss as a young adult. Rather than be prepared for my father’s death however, my childhood acted as a jenga game of grief and I had lost total control of my emotional and physical wellbeing. What this taught me is that grief is not prep school for the cruel world. There is no preparation for the suddenness of incomprehensible sorrow.
Yesterday a coworker and friend of mine died after rescuers retrieved him from a house fire. I have spent the last two days convincing myself that it did in fact happen. I reiterate to myself that the world is real and raw and young people die in tragic, unexpected and unavoidable circumstances. Instead of being emotionally removed from the situation with the space that adolescent obscurity brings you, this person was a friend I spoke with several times a week, and always with a weird anecdote to share with me that I have looked forward to for the past few months.
The intangibility of his family’s grief mixing with my personal history lurches around in my stomach like food poisoning. After having experienced the depths of loss and resurfaced, knowing someone out there is experiencing the familiarity of my grief envelopes the darkest parts of my imagination. Never having lost a child I fear I would be unable to resurface from my grief. The sudden loss of another young person is so deeply profound that it begs for a poetic revelation. As an adult these experiences no longer teach me anything prophetic about life but test my faith in God and instil in me anxiety over losing everyone that I care about. I worry I’m not taking enough precautions with safety in my own life and concern myself with the thought that should I die suddenly I’ll die not having accomplished any of my goals.
The only revelations that can come with such heavy a tragedy are to live your best life and try not to dwell on your regrets. Sometimes I wish I could revert to my childhood state of grief where I accepted life’s limitations and the cruelty of the world without the fixation of mortality weighing me down. But comparing grief from the perspective of a child to that of a grown woman is not necessarily a process of un-knowing how to grieve. We could use childhood naïveté as a lesson in simplifying grief in order to process death. I am going to focus on the loss itsself rather than the grim reality of mortality. The frigidity of the winter, unbearable this week in particular, will not last forever. Attempting to re-know how to grieve is to accept that we are not meant to live in fear of the unexpected but rather to process it.
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