WYG Day 2

If you could tell people something, tell them what is true, what is true about grief and love and loss, something they do not know, or can't know, what would it be? If you could address them, what would be said?

This prompt is a tough one (I have a feeling I am going to be saying that about EVERY prompt, but I digress). There’s more than one thing I want to say about this, so I will just see where I go with the time I got.

The first thing I will say about grief, love and loss is that when you experience the event that causes the loss that the grief immediately follows, you are thrown immediately from the ‘normal’ ‘real’ world and into a new shattered world that has rules that you do not know, that you will only learn by existing in the new shattered world, and that this is going to be your world from now on in.

There appears to be no returning to the ‘real’ ‘normal’ world that other people who haven’t experienced loss like this are in. To people on the outside, this sounds unimaginable, and it is. I think that maybe instead of unimaginable, they actually mean un-experienceable. They can imagine it all they want. The mind is really good at creating scenarios where lots of bad and good things can happen with quite a lot of accuracy. But the mind can only rely on the experiences that the person who owns the mind has experienced. Much like in acting with the Stanislavski method, the mind can only rely on what the person has experienced to bring forth characters’ genuine emotions. 

I also would say that every world of grief and loss is different. Mine so far as felt like a deep ocean, and maybe it’s because of where Sarah, Tyler, Lula and Arlo were when the first three mentioned were murdered, there’s caves. Lots of caves. Some of them have different things for me to see and feel that draw me in. Even though I have lungs, I have to learn how to breathe in this new world, and part of that learning to breathe in this new world is being kind to myself and relaxing into the grief and loss and not fight it. The harder I fight it, the harder it is for me to breathe, and the harder it is to breathe, the more anxiety I feel. So learning to accept the grief and loss for what they are is something I need to learn to do more.

Maybe yours is a desert. Maybe yours is a mountain. Maybe yours is outer space. Whatever the landscape of your grief and loss is, you have to learn to exist in it, and the only way to do so is by exploring (this is a good method to do so; there are others), by relaxing into the new landscape and learning its rules and what else lives there.

I was reasonably lucky (?) in that I didn’t have a lot of people trying to cheer me out of my grief and loss, but I am still only two months almost into this journey. No one told me that maybe this was God’s will (that comment just burns me up).

If I could say to someone who I know has not experienced this sort of loss and grief, when they fumble around and try to say the right thing, I would tell them that there is no right thing to say. There’s nothing that can be done to make this situation better, outside of finding a time machine to go back in time and make that not happen. Since we do not have that technology, it won’t happen. Things cannot be made better, even though our friends and family want to ease our suffering and pain. It’s good that they want to help us; they love us and want the best for us. The best thing they can do is listen and bear witness to the pain and grief and suffering, without words of hollow comfort.