Countless stages of grief

Grief is like glitter; No matter how much you try and tidy it up you’re never going to get rid of it all. You’re always going to find bits of it.

how can i overcome grief? i lost my father to suicide two years ago and i am still affected by the loss. i am too afraid to breach the topic with my therapist because i've never talked about it before and i don't know if i would be able to control myself. advice?

Death has nothing to do with going away. The sun sets The moon sets But they are not gone.

There is no clean and tidy end to grief. It is not like a cut that heals when new skin grows, leaving no trace. Grief has a rhythm, abating at times when other things hold your attention, but always reappearing. It is like a mountain range undulating and unfolding before you as you navigate a path along it.

And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore.

my current sadness, mourning. i’ve felt it before. i’m troubled because i find myself in a mental/emotional space reminiscent of my childhood and early adolescence where i spent most of it mourning over the loss of a parent who was still alive, still physically present in my life at times. but there was no feeling of safety, security, nurturance… but fear. and regardless of the positive changes that have happened over the course of the past half decade, it doesn’t change my experience, what has already been deeply imbedded. my awareness does not change what wasn’t, nor can it make up for it. i view my relationships differently, i interact with people differently, i understand other people’s negligence or personal struggles differently, but there is still pain, always, and i felt that perhaps it had become softer for a while. more bearable. i learned, and it did not disappear, but i learned to work with it in my life.

There will always be a profound sense of loss for what could of been.

Grieving people want and need to be heard, not fixed.

The shittiest thing about suicide is that you never get any answers. You can question it all you want and play the “if only” game, but it will never change anything and you’ll never know if you would have been able to do more. And even if you had done more, would it have only postponed what would ultimately happen?

I tagged my father on Facebook by accident, yesterday. I’ve heard lots of people speak on these social media eulogies—heard them say the comfort they take in the lingering presence of names too easily forgotten, heard them say they are grateful that our footprint on this world is just a little bit harder to erase. But I am so tired of making gospel of a dead man. I hate the way he shows up in the suggestions every time I type my own last name; this is a strange kind of haunting– one where I do not see him in the shadows of my parents’ home, but instead at three AM in my own apartment, cities away from the place where he died. Two and a half years later, and he is still smiling in his profile picture. I didn’t do poetry when my father was alive. But a few weeks ago, I accidentally invited him to a poetry slam in a city he’s never been to. And maybe there was a part of me still hoping he’d show up to it. I have a lot of things left to say to my father, got a lot of heartbreak that went unanswered for, apologies on both sides that were never given. But this is not the kind of grief you leave on a Facebook wall. This is not “I thought about you, today” kind of pain. And I can’t help but resent all the people whose aftermath is so simple as to be parsed out in a three hundred character paragraph on a page my family does not have the password for. How dare their grief be so succinct. I have spent two and a half years trying to put words to this, I still don’t have enough of them. I cannot stomach the “I miss you”s from strangers: people he hadn’t spoken to in twenty years, people who did not know the ugly of his last moments, who remember the man before the sickness, who did not grow up in a house full of landmines, did not kiss their father goodnight knowing he was a time-bomb. I know it’s selfish, but I do not want to be privy to their second-hand grief. I don’t care what his college friends have to say about him. His wall has become a morgue I did not want to be buried in. So instead, I resurrect his ghost on a microphone, I pray to half-forgotten echoes of a childhood where his love did not come with a caveat, I refuse to lay him down to rest and yet I have the gall to be sanctimonious. All this time, and I am still willing to put parameters around everyone else’s grieving without taking responsibility for my own. My father’s Facebook wall is a reminder of all the people who have managed to move on from his passing, when here I am: writing the same poem for the hundredth time, no closer to being able to say goodbye to him.

One of the hardest things you will ever have to do, my dear, is to grieve the loss of a person who is still alive.