on grief

“Sometimes, I can still feel my fingers warm as my mother pressed my hand on the cold hard metal,” this is the first line of a poem I wrote years ago. An image of touching my father’s casket is one of my most painful memories and poetry has always been my craft. At the age of five, death was one of the earliest life events that I experienced. I was too young to process its concept, and the adults were too confused and conflicted to explain it.

I remember feeling these heavy, intense nameless emotions, but nothing else. The exhaustion and frazzled confusion were too much to understand, let alone put into words. But that didn’t stop the images and sounds that stamped themselves into my memory. Even worse, I intensely felt every emotion of the people who attended my father’s funeral. I was sad at the unknown feeling that I was carrying and angry that it was bold enough to attach itself to the theft of my dad.

Once older, I was repeatedly thrown into unexpected tragedies that led to grief. During my twenties, a childhood friend tragically passed. Again, I felt a large part of myself was stolen. The grief was unimaginable, and even worse death continued to appear in cyclical waves to show its hand. As later in years my grandmother, aunt, and uncle not much later. Now it did seem to slow a bit for a few years and during this time, I underwent extreme loss and hardship. I slowly began my journey towards spiritual and emotional wellness but struggled to stay consistent in anything that wasn’t work or school related.

Then, in my second year of graduate school, I was enrolled in a course that assigned a book by Jasmyn Ward Men We Reaped. I was surprised that Ward’s novel illustrated the perpetual, gnawing “from cradle to grave” state of being in her life. Grief. The feeling that had no name. It was the first time that I began to understand an emotion that I had carried since the age of five.

Over the past five years, I have experienced a tremendous amount of death in all forms beyond just the physical. The cycle of grief wasn’t only from losing loved ones, but also the loss of things in my life that I assumed as a part of my identity. Spoiler alert: It wasn’t.

I had become so used to processing grief in unhealthy ways through excessive behavior, that it was years before I began to be emotionally healthy for me. During this time, I had some around me who ignored me completely until I “felt better,” but my closest always filled in where those seemed to drop off.

This was when I realized that grief looks different for everyone. We all grieve differently and there isn’t a “wrong” or “right” way. There are so many of us experiencing waves of loss and life-altering changes, and it’s overwhelming. Offering genuine empathy towards another is a universal way of support that is always needed. Though as simple as it sounds, it’s not easy for everyone to extend it. Practicing mindfulness can help you connect to empathy, the humanistic trait that can evolve to honor death and celebrate life.