Grief - Not Just During the Holidays

I struggle to think that I lied. 

Last year when I wrote my first heartfelt piece to be published I spoke about how I “decorate the tree not with heartache and desperation of going back to the good old days, but instead with hope and pride” when really all I felt was the former. 

I struggle to think I’m not really a liar.

Everything I wrote in that article is true to how I felt at that moment. I've had great things come from writing it actually, but in trying to make grief seem less daunting and hard I completely lost sight that it is daunting and hard. 

The truth is writing that piece unlocked the flood gates to something I had been holding in for years without realizing. I felt ashamed to decorate the tree by myself again, I cried when my dog chewed up the gift I had gotten my brother and sobbed because Christmas felt so empty. 

I felt like a fraud. 

How could I come here and preach hope to tons of people when I myself didn’t have any. I listened to all my friends talk about what they were gifted and how they had fun spending time with family. I envied their happiness.  I felt like I had just started the five stages of grief all over again. I talked so much about being able to find that light at the end of the tunnel when I kept finding myself in the dark again. 

I tried to lie to myself that this winter wasn’t all bad because I learned the “true meaning of Christmas” but this failed to comfort my feelings of loss. And my grief didn’t just stay during the holidays either, nor does it only come during the holidays. I continue to experience it, even going into my senior year. I cried for nights on end because I felt like I had no one. 

This year, as a senior, I’ve written about memories with my Dad in English Class and doing so, it made me think “if I had this many great memories with him in only the first 11 years of my life, imagine how many more I would have had if he were still here.”

Every time I failed at something I loved, I could only sit and think to myself how disappointed my dad would be to see where I ended up. And every night, I felt defeated. I would be reminded about the article I wrote last year, and how I was such an imposter. Every milestone I hit knowing my Dad won’t be there to watch it, I felt that darkness again. 

In writing that article I thought I had hit the last stage of grief, acceptance.  When you hear “acceptance” you think “Oh! So there will be a point when I just stop feeling so sad”. 

I’m here to tell you that isn’t true. 

Acceptance is not never feeling grief ever again, but accepting that you have to feel it forever. 

It's accepting you lost a person and you are going to have days harder than others.

It’s understanding that acceptance doesn’t mean you don’t care anymore or you have hit the final stage of grief, but that you will continue to go through every stage all over again once it's triggered. 

It’s being able to accept the fact that this is something you live with for the rest of your life and it sucks. 

It’s all part of being human. I don't write this to make someone sad, or worry about your future,  because the truth is that loss is a part of everyone's life and some day it will happen to everyone. I write this because if we refuse to talk about the bad and the ugly, we isolate the people going through it. 

My old article is true. 

I felt just as passionate writing it then as I do writing this now. However, it is just the uglier part of being vulnerable. If we can’t be vulnerable then we’ve lost our humanity. We lose people to their grief all the time and it’s because they don’t feel safe or confident enough to share their stories. They feel isolated from the world that keeps spinning when theirs has stopped because, “no one wants to be sad”. 

My grief fell on deaf ears but we all need to know that there is someone out there who will listen, so from one grieving kid to another, I see you.