Grief Is …
Grief is that feeling where nothing is flat. There are mountains and hills and mud, and giant pieces of glass. There is fire and lightning and floods, and you are walking in it, without any shoes on. In the dark.
Grief is scolding hot and chilled to the bone. It gets in your nails and leaves you unwhole.
Grief is being jealous of your own brother, because he gets to have two beautiful kids with his wife. Envious of your own parents, because they get to be married to the same person for 45 years and counting. Grief is walking into a nursing home to visit an elderly relative, and walking out wondering what your husband would have been like at the age of 50. 65. 74. 83 …
Grief is that migraine that pounds in your head and screams in your ear while you sleep. Grief is the monster that keeps you from sleeping. The illness that steals your reason. Your life.
Grief is in your eyeballs, in your knees, in your feet. It’s in your hips and your fingers. Grief lays in your stomach and churns. Grief is a pain in your arms. It’s heavy, like carrying sandbags on your shoulders. Everyday. Every second. Grief hurts every inch of your body. All the time. Always.
Grief is the bear in the woods, waiting to pounce. It’s a jumbled sentence. It’s 157 emotions trapped inside of a tiny room – fighting.
Grief is a silent Hell. Nobody could ever understand. Nobody could ever feel your pain. Nobody gets you. Grief is isolating. Lonely. Sick.
Grief is nausea. Hysteria. Anxiety wrapped in panic. Fearing what comes next. Fearing right now.
Grief is looking at a sunset and wondering if he can see it too. Grief makes you question. Makes you doubt. Leaves you unsure and unsafe.
Grief doesn’t leave. It’s that weird, annoying uncle who tells the same story over and over and over again, everyday, every year, on Thanksgiving. Grief is repetitive. Grief is repetitive. Grief is repetitive …..
Grief is a pimple that won’t ever pop. It’s a sadness that lives inside you. Grief is feeding yourself poison, everyday. Standing still, but feeling seasick. Overthinking, but incoherant. An ocean filled with dirt. Music that pierces your eardrum. Grief is the sky inside of your throat. Trapped. Scared. Waiting to be freed.
Grief makes you ugly and mean and cold. It’s that thing that won’t let you go. Won’t let you move forward. The elevator with no floors. The escalator that doesn’t stop. A board game played for eternity. A merry-go-round forever. Grief is that friend that won’t take a hint. It sleeps on your couch and doesn’t pay rent. It’s a scream and a whisper. A push and a pull. A stab and a dull.
Grief is guilt. So much guilt. Guilt for bad thoughts. Good thoughts. Guilt for feeling joy. Guilt for existing, while he lies there dead.
Grief has no logic. No sense. No soul.
This is my grief. You get your own. They are the same, but not at all. Grief does not share. It is selfish and rude. Grief will not go. It stays. It changes. It shifts. It hurts and it pains and it stomps and it punches. It ebbs and it flows. It calms, and then pours.
There is no start. No finish. No middle. It’s just there, all the time. Like breathing.
If you survive it, and if you breathe through it and with it, you might emerge someone new.
Changed.
Darker. Evolved. Different. Awake.
Higher. Lighter. Re-born. Relieved.
Grief is an endless loop. A book with no last page.
Grief is nothing.
It is everything.
It is selfish and all-consuming.
It is vague and grey and cloudy.
Grief is a circle, and you are inside.
Going ’round.
and around and around.
Keep going around.
Don’t fight it.
Just roll.
