To Accept The Process of Grief and Healing
“Grief is like a rock you carry in your pocket. It’s heavy, awkward, and always there, pressing against you with every step. Sometimes it’s sharp, cutting into you when you least expect it. Other times, it just sits there, a weight you can’t ignore. You don’t get to put it down and you don’t get to walk away from it, you just keep going, because you have no choice.”-Mari Botha
We all experience loss. This does not mean we all experience the same type of loss, but losing someone or something we care about and/or love affects each and every one of us. With loss comes grief, and grief is something I am still working my way through understanding.
Less than three months ago, I lost a person I truly thought I would love for the rest of my life. I won’t go into the deep details as those are private and still painful to share and talk about.
I believe if you truly love someone or something, despite the circumstances, the love never fully goes away. From my personal experience, there are times when it doesn’t feel real, almost as if this person is on a vacation and has their phone turned off.
Some of my favorite moments I have of him include watching him chase his big dreams with his innovative and risk-taking ideas and visions. I loved watching him take pride in himself and his accomplishments. Most of all, I loved watching him be a great, loving father to his daughter. There are many more, but I won’t get into all of those in this post particularly.
The thing I am realizing is that grief is not linear and can be experienced in so many ways for so many reasons. Grief can be described as a feeling we have after losing someone or something that we truly cared about and/or loved. We don’t experience that level of pain if what we’ve lost did not matter in some deep sort of way.
I am not here to give advice to anyone about how to properly grieve a loss of anyone or anything in their life because we all process and grieve so differently. There are times when I talk about memories, and reminisce on the time I spent with him and the person I was during that time. Sometimes I will scream sing the songs he used to love. Then, there are other times that I will be sobbing my eyes out to music that brings back memories of the past. Like I said, it’s different from day to day.
One thing I have learned for certain throughout this process is that loss will forever change not only your life, but also yourself. I have found much more gratitude throughout this time. I am grateful for him, the memories, and the time I was blessed to have with him. I am also grateful for the people who have surrounded me with love, kindness, and understanding. I realized that I have nothing to be ashamed of for feeling anything that comes along with grief.
If the loss is sudden, it can definitely come as a shock. It can also be accompanied with feelings of guilt and/or shame. It can come with feelings of denial, anger, and/or confusion. They say there are five stages of grief which include: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I believe that those stages are not followed in one single path and that we feel all of the five stages at different points in our grief process.
By experiencing the feelings that I have within the last couple of months, I have gained such a new perspective of grief. At first, the word “grief” sounded like it was such a bad thing. Grief is definitely one of the most challenging things to experience and go through in our lifetime. However, grief is a process of healing. The journey of healing is not linear, and neither is the process of grief. There are a lot of twists and turns in the roads of our healing journey, as well as the journey of processing and working through our grief.
For me personally, I feel blessed to have had so much love for someone that losing them does come with a lot of grief and pain. I know the good memories I will cherish for the rest of my life. I know it’s so hard when we lose anyone or anything that we don’t feel should be taken away from us. However, I have to believe that God has a plan for everything in our lives and we may not ever fully understand his plan.
We all cope differently. We all process our feelings and emotions differently. We all question things differently. We go through the stages of grief very differently. Somedays we may feel 3 out of the 5 stages and other days we may feel numb to it all. As human beings with emotions, we are all going to process things at the pace that is set for us individually.
Although there are differences in how we grieve, one thing will always be the same. Each and every single one of us has experienced some type of loss at some point in our lives. Like I said, grief is not a linear process and does not always follow all five stages in a specific order and that is definitely okay.
Always remember that YOU are NOT alone in your healing or grief journey.
No one loss is greater or worse than someone else’s loss because we all have different values and perceive loss differently. Maybe someone loses a loved one, a job, a pet, a dream, a friend, a game, a valuable item they cherished, or even loses themselves. It does not matter what the loss is that you have experienced, it is valid to feel how you feel. Keep the people who you love and cherish close to you. Reach out for help. Let out your emotions. Feel the feelings. Lastly, always remember there is NOT a timeline or a deadline for when you should be fully healed from anything that you have experienced throughout your lifetime.
I simply just want to finish this blog by saying how grateful I am to have loved someone as special as Jayden. He is missed every day and I hope his legacy lives on for a lifetime. I hope he knows how loved and how special he truly was and how grateful so many of us are that he was a part of our life.
Thank you for reading. I hope you have a blessed day.
