When You're Grieving
On love and loss
When you’re grieving…
…you’ll have the most random memories about your friend and how the last time you saw her, she tried to organize the twisted straps of your overalls, and you told her to stop because they never stayed smooth, but she kept straightening and yelling, “YOU’RE TWISTED!” and she thought that was hilarious because it was.
When you’re grieving, you will be in shock for a while, and you will eat half your body weight in sugar and watch four hours of Below Deck Med. You think a properly spiritual person would be meditating and mindfully journaling about your dead friend, but you mustn’t beat yourself up about this. Chocolate and Bravo are way better than the horribly self-destructive things you actually want to be doing. Just eat more sugar; this is what sugar is for.
When you’re grieving, you’ll think you’re ok because you’ve not cried in a whole day, but then you see a songbird lying dead in front of a window, and it will absolutely unhinge you.
When you’re grieving, you can’t cry when you want to cry, and you will cry when it makes no sense. You will sleep when you should be awake, and be awake when you should be sleeping. But none of this is for you to judge.
When you’re grieving, you will feel it’s too much, and you should be moving on by now. It’s not, and you shouldn’t. Grief is not linear. Healing takes time and is really fucking messy.
When you’re grieving, you’ll feel strange pains in your body that have no logical genesis. That’s because the grief is trying to go somewhere, but it can’t move quite yet.
When you’re grieving, you want to tell everyone about your friend, and how she was so stunningly beautiful, that once when you two were grocery shopping, the cashier guy spontaneously proposed. She smiled and said she was already married. Which she wasn’t. But she thought that was the kind thing to say, because this was not the first time a random man spontaneously proposed to her.
When you’re grieving, there are three seconds in the morning when you forget what happened. Enjoy those three seconds.
When you’re grieving, people check in on you, and it means everything. Remember to feel that love, and when other people are grieving, remember to return the favour so they know they are loved.
When you’re grieving, re-reading your texts with her is comforting but also so painful. Be careful not to pick at that scab for too long.
When you’re grieving, you’ll feel the loss of thirty years of friendship, and wonder how it’s possible that it doesn’t feel like nearly enough.
When you’re grieving, you’ll decide to set up an appointment with that psychic she loved who can talk to dead people, because you really want to believe that is real and there is some other place we go after this, and you want to know that she made it to that other place safely. Like when you used to tell her to check in when her plane landed.
When you’re grieving, you are going to get angry because someone is not supposed to die nine days after getting a cancer diagnosis, and you need to get mad at someone, and it sucks when there is nobody to get mad at. Get good at apologizing to your partner when you send anger to the wrong person.
When you’re grieving, you are going to worry that all kinds of other things have gone terribly wrong, and that everyone else you love is going to die in nine days, too. That’s what happens with a trauma. It’s awful, but you can work with it, and it won’t always be quite this hard.
When you’re grieving, don’t worry about getting enough protein.
When you’re grieving, it’s ok if you don’t answer your email right away.
When you’re grieving, put both hands on your heart and breathe into the broken parts. Notice that you can still keep breathing in and out, even with a broken heart. Keep breathing in and out.
When you’re grieving, you’ll be comforted by the fact that in your last text to her, you told her you loved her.
When you’re grieving, you’ll decide that you’re never again going to worry that you are too mushy, and that you’ll tell everyone you love them all the time.
Because whether you’re grieving or not — that’s everything.
Love you all.
Thanks for being here.
~Lisa
So beautifully written. <3
😢😢😢