“Grief. The Moment when you realize that your world and the world are entirely separate. When your world has come to a grinding halt, when you’re drowning and flailing about, and the world just rolls on without you.”
― Nikki Erlick, “The Poppy Fields”
Today is the four-year anniversary of my dad’s death.
It crept up on me slowly; yet today when I woke up after a restless night full of weird dreams, I knew it wasn’t a regular day. My body told me that it wasn’t. Today is a day that my heart holds sadness and heaviness…grief.
These past six and a half years have been filled with loss…. My 15-year-old son, my last grandparent, my dad, one of my dearest friends, as well as a newer friend and advocate. Someone once said to me that it seemed as if I was jinxed – that death was following me around. It was an awful thing to hear in retrospect, yet at the time felt true.
I have struggled immensely these last six and a half years; however, what I feel has changed over these years. In the immediate aftermath of a loss, I was swept up in the deepest of grief and even though I felt alone, I never was. And yet, now…. 6 and a half years later, four years later, two years later…. Today – I feel unseen. My grief feels lost in the wind. Why? Because while my world continues to be tilted, the rest of the world has seemed to right itself and gone about its business.
I recently read the fictional book “The Poppy Fields” by Nikki Erlick. This novel explores the individual nature of grief and healing, while examining the human impulse to sidestep the more difficult aspects of the healing process. In the book, grievers are given the option to be put to sleep for 4-6 weeks to, in a sense, sleep through the first, most difficult stages of grief and emerge only at a time when the pain becomes more manageable.
However, the treatment comes with emotional side effects, leading to detachment from memories and relationships. As the characters confront their own grief and loss, they must grapple with the ethical implications of using such a treatment and what it means to truly heal.
What would you do if given a choice to sleep for a bit and lessen the pain (or completely become detached from it), or live through grief? Here’s my quick take…. Where there is great grief, there is great love, and I never, ever, want to forget how amazing that love was and is today.
Grief is uncomfortable for those not grieving. People want you to overcome. Companies give you five days to grieve the loss of a child. A week, two at most, and then you should be over it. Over what? The love and loss of someone so deeply embedded in your life that you can’t imagine it without them. And yet, to spare the feelings of OTHERS, we stamp down our grief, we minimize it, we say we are fine.
Today a friend asked me how I was doing… I said “fine” and then proceeded to seek out a corner of my workplace to cry because I wasn’t “fine”. What I really needed was a hug, for someone to say, “I see you”.
Grief is lonely. Partly because no one can understand exactly how YOU feel, and partly because we don’t admit when we don’t want to be alone.
Do I want to sleep away a month of grief? No, because human connection and emotional support is how we move through the grief process – it’s how we learn to find joy again, it’s how we learn empathy for others, it’s how we heal. However, there have been many times when I wanted to curl up in my bed and not get up for a very long time because grief is exhausting. The thought of moving through life without some of the people you love most in the world – it shouldn’t have to be that way, and yet it is. Life is love and loss. It is joy and heartbreak.
As time moves, so do I… trudging through the grief and filling my heart with joy all at the same time. I will never “get over” these losses. These people I love will forever be a part of me. My heart carries them with me everywhere I go. Sometimes that looks like tears, and other times laughter. I accept that. I honor that. Because love doesn’t end when a life does. And we survive by talking about those we love and remember.
“Grief doesn’t disappear. It just learns new ways to sit with you.” – Donna, “The Poppy Fields”