What people donât tell you about grief
Society makes us believe a bunch of things about grief that can slow down the process of mourning. Hereâs what they donât tell you :Â
> The five stages of grief is bullshitÂ
Because thereâs actually 7 stages and they are also bullshit. You donât have to feel denial, or anger, or anything, it is unique for every one of us. Some people donât ever feel anger. Some feel sadness first then the shock then the acceptation, then the denial, etc. Conclusion : itâs bullshit.Â
> People will tell you horrible thingsÂ
My personnal favorites are â they are in a better place â yeah Stephanie but Iâd rather have them with me :)) and â if you sell the house/the car/any other item , Iâd like to buy it ! â do I look like I can deal with this right now ??Â
Sometimes they want to soothe us⌠And they try hard⌠But itâs clumsy. â You already have childrens itâs okay to miscarriage â, â at least you were expecting them to die â, â they didnât suffer â. People will tell you â they wouldnât want to see you like this â and itâs horrible because we are fucking destroyed but we feel guilty about it, because we think our loved one would be disappointed in us. Itâs truly painful.
> Thereâs a physical dimension in griefÂ
First because when you loose a person, you loose them physically. They do not longer exist as a body on earth, the loss is a true loss of someone. Itâs not even the fact that we lost connection with this person, itâs the fact that their body is not there anymore.
Second because we need stuff to mourn. We need objects, clothes, pictures, bed sheets, jewelry, grave. We need to touch and feel on our skin, we sit in closets between clothes, we smell bed sheets, we play with their car keys, we wear their necklace.Â
> After a time, people expect you to be okay
And that fucking sucks. They will expect â Iâm okay â when they ask how we are doing, they will think that you moved on and that your grief is over so they will act like it. Some of them may even blame you for â still being sad â. In the same vibes, after a time people stop calling and proposing their help because they assume youâre over it.
> It will get harder by the timeÂ
According to psychiatrists, after about 1 year ½ - 2 years, youâve done a good part of the process and so you can start thinking about the person without waking in yourself any pain, you grew up from the tragedy⌠But it feels like youâre loosing the person a second time. Psychiatrists say you may feel miserable and like youâve not grieved - basically returning at the beginning of mourning. Thanksfully after few months feeling this way, you will rise again <3
> You will do weird things
Literally, because loosing a person is a tsunami. You may find yourself searching for explanations about embalming bodies, crying because you didnât park right, eating one single food every damn meal for weeks, watching cartoons with your kids/your siblings/or even alone, sleeping in the bathtub. Everybody copes their own way, let yourself rest on the flow.Â
> You will never be on the same page as people
If both partners loose a child, they will never be on the same page ; for one of them today is a okay-day, for the other today is a I-canât-get up-beacause-of-pain-day. Same for siblings that loose a parent, etc. And that is why grief is the loneliest psychological process that exist. You will feel very, very, very alone and everyone else around you also feel that way.
You body will hurt just as much as your soul, you will probably get sick after few weeks, I personally could not walk the day after the funeral because of how tensed I was during the ceremony. You may even sleep 11 hours and still feel exhausted ; as I said, thereâs a physical dimension in grief and it makes us very tired.Â
Life will never be the same, but if you needed a sign  : you got this.Â