Grief

Grief is such a weird thing. It's so heavy.

It weighs down on you and slows down your experience so that you notice every detail. Every moment is in sharp relief.

It's a bit like moving in slow motion - a heightened sense of reality that actually feels quite surreal. You get to observe yourself doing things.

The world looks exactly the same, everyone else is moving at their regular speed, and somehow you're moving so slowly, as if moving through water. There's this unseen force making your limbs slow and heavy.

I've experienced grief before. This isn't my first rodeo.

But this is different...

As much as different people have different ways of grieving, perhaps even for one person every grief they experience is different from another. Because every relationship is different. Every person being grieved for is unique - therefore the grief we feel at their passing is also unique

Not all grief is the intense, on the surface, life will never be the same, my heart is broken in a million pieces kind of grief.

With some losses, life isn't going to change in a dramatic way on a daily basis.

While that all may be true, the fabric of one's life has still had a string pulled from it. It isn't the string that holds it all together, but it does alter the shape slightly, if almost imperceptibly. This change must be acknowledged, felt.

Where this grief is the same as with previous times for me is that it needs to find a voice. This is my way of handling it. It demands to be heard and seen and felt and shared. As with so many things in my inner world - it's not doing well being kept in the shadows (as much as I would prefer to keep it there). These gremlins gnaw and claw and fester until they are given their due.

So here I am. With a pen, with a keyboard, giving grief it's chance to be seen, to be heard and to be shared.