The True Nature of Grief

Grief. 

It’s not a pretty word, which is good considering the concept is so far from beautiful. Having a gentle and nice-sounding word would make it even more abstract than it is, and it is abstract. A lot of people think of grief as the crying and emotional mess that follows immediately after loss.  

It's not.  

It’s every day. It’s every moment, every single second of every single day. It’s not some neat concept of you lose, you cry, you get up, you’re fine. If you genuinely think this, maybe you've never experienced grief the same way I have. And that's okay. But we should talk about it. 

For starters, the moment of loss is not the starting point of grief. No, the true moment is the moment of realization that loss is coming. The phone call, the text, the gut feeling that something is wrong. It’s a bunch of small and insignificant moments that you don’t truly recognize until you know that loss is coming.  

You don’t know when the last moment will be that you hear them, see them, touch them, or even just feel their presence.  

Then comes the shock and the denial. It can’t be happening. You knew loss was evident because it’s an intricate part of human nature. As Christian college students, we learn in classes that humanity is destined for death and pain because of our own failings in the Garden of Eden, but we are still so surprised when we personally face it. We don’t see it coming, even though we know that it is inevitable. No one can escape it, beyond the Christian hope of what lies past it.  

You live in a state of shock that quickly changes to a fog of emptiness. You mourn for the missing person by feeling as if you are sucked into the lack of space that they once occupied. You’re present physically, but not mentally or emotionally. You go through the motions of typical human life on autopilot because you don’t know what else to do. You feel like you shouldn’t wake up the next day, but you know you will until the day comes for you to take Death’s hand.  

It can sometimes take weeks or months for the first moment of clarity to come. This is the moment where it suddenly hits you like a strike against your face, knocking you down and bearing down on your dazed form. You are forced to face the reality of what has happened and that your world has shifted on such a cataclysmic level.  

You lose it. You break down into fits that resemble the turbulent storm going on in your mind. You cry and scream and beat the ground and shake the world like you have been shaken. You want comfort but you don’t know how. Others want to give you comfort, but they don’t know how or are afraid of doing so. That makes it all worse because then you are mad at them for not understanding.  

For them, the world hasn’t shifted. For the normal passersby, the world has continued on without them even knowing your loss.  

That makes you enraged, and you want to scream even more. “How dare they! How dare the woman laughing with her friend does not cry! How dare the child that kisses their mother does not weep!” It’s a selfish feeling - you know it, but you don’t care. All you can think about is what you lost.  

The other selfish people make it worse. You see people take the gift they have - the lives that they love - for granted. You see people who are careless or ignorant of their blessing, and it just makes you want to shake them. How can they not understand that they are wasting something you would kill to have back, even for just a tiny moment? How can they not understand how haunted you are? Even those that loved the person you lost don’t even seem to get it, at least not to you. If they did, they would certainly be curled up in the same ball of misery that you are.  

Right? 

Some people wallow in that state of rage and despair for years. Addictions spring up as people try to numb the pain and the memories. Others bury themselves in the emotions because it makes them feel alive and real. The person who was lost starts to become a part of a past that you need to make sure was not just some foggy dream.  

Eventually, you have to get up. The world does not wait for anyone. You have to go to class, to work, to the store. You don’t get the choice to just sit there and die when you have a life that you now have to live for two. You bury the overwhelming pain and find other people, other hobbies. They don’t completely ease it, but you don’t feel so much like giving up when they are there.  

It doesn’t erase the pain. There are moments that bring it back like the first. You hear a song, smell a scent, hear a laugh, see a familiar item of fondness. You pray at night to see them in dreams to let you know that they are finally at peace. I personally think you do get to see that. You get to see them surrounded by a light and a warmth, finally happy. These are the dreams that you don’t remember but feel a fondness for. You love those dreams, but you don’t know why. 

Honestly, to think about grief as a whole, I think it’s kind of like glitter. It’s a common metaphor, but it’s truth. Even before the explosion, you start to get colored by flakes, but then the blast comes. You are covered in it from head to toe, a sparkly mess that looks more like you were struck by a bomb. You eventually push it off and wipe yourself clean, but it never goes away. For days, weeks, months and years, you still find traces of it in the rough carpet.  

It’s a pretty metaphor, for people who want to give it that. For those that have experienced it, you understand the truth that it will never be pretty. It can never be pretty.  

It just is.