Grief

Grief may only have five letters but this word is one of the strongest words that can affect even the strongest person. Grief can rip you to the inner most self and put you in a place so deep you feel like you will never be a float again. It is like a test that keeps on giving because once grief hits your life it never leaves, you could say it is a shapeshifter and can come for many different reasons. Seems that when it over takes you the darkness seems never ending ,until it does not.

We have all heard that annoying saying that time heals all. I know at times when I have heard that when I have had a substantial loss in my life I felt a little aggravation unsure of what to say back to the person. If you think about it, when time goes by after a substantial loss but it doesn not ever feel healed. At least for me it has never felt like I had built up scar tissue around the hole that was left in my heart due to a loss. "Healed" I am thinking is a subjective word and one that can be anything and mean different things. Healing meaning I am over it? Healing meaning I'm able to speak their names without feeling a huge lump in my throat that only goes away when I swallow their name? Healing meaning I am able to celebrate holidays without them passing through my mind as a pain feels my heart? Healing meaning I can talk about memories without a tear forming in the corner of my left eye? Healing meaning I move on? So many questions on what that really means or is it just something we have come up with to help someone when we just do not know what to say?

It is simple our hearts will never heal from the hole that they left. But do we want it to? We learn to expect and tolerate comfortably that lump in our throat that forms when we speak their names. We just do not swallow their names anymore, we move through the discomfort and push through the smile as if we do not feel that ever present lump. Damn that lump! Bright side that we learn to say their name again. The holidays get easier not because we do not think of them, but because we learn that thinking of them is a given and the pain becomes part of the holiday. Learning to hide that emptiness that we feel becomes part of the process. Positive from this is that we celebrate, celebrate with the ones around us when we thought we would never celebrate again. We learn to hold the tear back and then when we can we unload them when noone is watching and sometimes we can even smile with that tear thinking about those wonderful things we remember and cherish about them.

Our hearts get larger with the space to hold memories of them, the pain, the "what if's", our new memories, and our past and new loves. Time can be do a lot of things but time does not heal. I do not take away the power of time because time can help. Time can help. Hear that? Time will help and with time you will figure out that the five letter word "GRIEF" actually encouraged us to heal, encouraged us to pick up the pieces, made us face the fact they are gone, made us face that hurt meanwhile bringing us closer to them even though we feel so far away from the one we loved. While time helps our heart what we will never do is move on or get over it. Greif is yours and it will help you get through your loss if you let it.

Love helps, memories help, time helps, grief helps.