Grief is such a crazy emotion.
What’s even crazier, is you could research it … study it … but it is such a complex and shape-shifting thing I find it pretty impossible to confine it in a tidy box.
There is nothing “tidy” about grief.
It’s messy.
It’s complicated.
It’s definitely not linear.
It can sneak up on you like the best predator out there. It can also have this wild physical component to it. I’m not talking just about how feeling grief can make you cry, or make you feel exhausted. It can actually give you physical symptoms–aches, pains, changes in the way you breath…
I reframe my perspective about grief all the time. I hit the 3 year marker a couple months ago, so I’ve got some distance between me and The Event. It’s easier to be able to have perspective as time passes. The newness of it all has worn off, even though the grief is still there.
I’m expecting the grief to always be there. My old friend, Grief, never leaves my side!
I was hit with a wave of it earlier in the week. The son of an artist friend of mine is battling cancer. He was involved with a TedX talk with a few other people on the topic of mortality. I watched it, knowing it might stir up some emotions. It did.
It feels like an old injury that you bump into now and then. You remember exactly how it happened, how it felt and to a certain extent, you re-feel and re-experience it all.
Although you can grieve things as well as people, it’s often very closely tied to love–another of life’s emotions that can be messy and complicated.
When I experience intense emotions I try to remember that this IS the human experience. These emotions in this physical body is part of life. I would rather surf the waves than drown in them.
