grief

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”

- Jamie Anderson

It’s the kind of grief that genuinely crumbles you, right there on the kitchen floor, knees giving and sinking to the ground, body shaking, mouth open in a silent scream. As though it were some monster that you could scream out of your body and into the night.

You can push it away, distract yourself with anything that numbs the pain, but it’s always there to greet you at the end of it.

So at some point you stop fighting it.

The moment I gave in it was as though an entire ocean swallowed me whole and I’m still trying to find my way to the surface.

5 years and still there are tears almost every day.

I don’t ask for them, I don’t call them up.

I don’t want to cry.

This grief has a spirit of its own. It awakens and spreads through me of it’s own accord, at the most random moments.

Mostly it comes at night, right before sleep. Or in the middle of the night, an ache in my chest so strong and so deep it wakes me from sleep and I lie there, clutching my chest and sobbing and reminding myself to breathe until sleep takes me under again.

And sometimes it hits in the middle of the day, in the happiest of moments surrounded by happy people.

There are some days where it feels endless, like all I am and all I ever will be is this pain. It feels the way I imagine it would feel if you dove into the depths of the ocean, thinking you were are the bottom, then seeing a canyon that drops hundreds of metres deeper.

And it’s so dark. But somehow, when I give myself over to the grief it always carries me back to the surface and I can breathe again for a while.

I have no idea how to navigate it, but I know my body is wise. I trust that she knows what to do so I listen to her. And all I can do is sit with it, giving it all the space it needs to run this river back to the sea.

And it is terrifying and excruciating and beautiful all at once. To be so moved by something, to feel so much. To me that has always been a kind of beauty.

I know that I have known love, if only by the the grief that came in the wake of it’s leave.

I know that I have known love because beneath all of this grief, that is all that really remains.

And one day, maybe all these rivers of tears will have made their way back to the sea and all that will be left is love.

a poem

It’s the kind of grief that knocks the air out of your throat, lungs collapsing under the weight of

nothing

empty

How to breathe when the very life of you feels gone?

Remind yourself to take a breath.

Fill

Empty

Fill.

Why can’t I do the same? I was full, now I am empty. I guess my lungs know something that I don’t. And so my lungs take over and I

breathe in

and out

and there is nothing else.

And I wonder; how many times would I have died by now if my lungs weren’t stronger than my grief?