Notes on Grief

Took me 2 weeks to write, so I knew this would cut.

There are three places where Grief grows.

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Grief grows in self-mourn. You are watching the thing that looks like your body lay down on a tiled hard floor and shrink. Deeply, infinitely. You cannot stop the absolute loss because it’s buried beneath the happy facade. Beneath the waking up everyday,

the “hello-how are you- I’m fine” timetable you’ve coded into your formula,

the dismissals of “it happened, it hurt, I move on”.

The signs, the notices, the subtle marks that have built traction over weeks, over months, over years, until you learnt to mistake self-annihilation for self- growth.

But one day, grief sat you down and handed you an eviction letter from your own body. And it didn’t happen on a sad, solemn night. It happened just after a happy moment, after you’d cheered around with mumsy, your brothers, your lover, your best friends. You’d laughed with them over the next gist and good news. And genuinely, you’d felt excited, thrilled, elated!

But the moment you finished that dance with them, a tornado hit. It felt like a comet suddenly launched on earth…the comet being the annihilator and your body the massacre. The comet was Grief. It sucked out your lungs and left you grappling for anything in your skeletal system that felt like air — a happy memory maybe, a childhood moment maybe, or when you’d even achieved one of those your dreams—

You tried to grasp that air, but when your hands reached for surface, all it touched was emptiness.

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the next place of Grief is the one where you mourn the thing that is not dead, but is.

The love that could have been. The friendship that ended before you gave it life. The situationship that would always remain a maybe and not a future thing. The opportunity that felt like it was within your grasp but fled last minute.

Sigh. I cannot speak too much on this one. Because this one hurts. Because this one is still raw. Because without the strength of will and trust in God, you will forever miss possibilities instead of turning them into opportunities.

Because this grief leaves you wanting and makes “What If?” the policeman. He’s always chasing you, always teasing you, but with every new lead, you disappear like Houdini, crafting new reasons why every weapon in your life is fashioned against you.

Maybe right now I don’t know what I’m rambling. But I do hope that if you are in this phase right now, you do not stay. You do not stay. You do not stay.

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The third place of Grief is the one where you mourn the being who is gone. The one who built space in your heart, claimed it, and then left it hollow, lost, because death took them away.

This is the space that cannot be filled. Not the drunk nights. Not the denials. Not the tears. Not playing youthful songs.

So you try.

You count the moments you spent together so they DON’T one day evaporate and fade into thin air. You cement them in your mind, hoping against all odds that death was just play-play. You hope that somewhere, somehow, he’s waiting in a closet, ready to prance up any moment with “SURPRISE! I just wanted to know how you guys would feel if I was gone”. But this one is no make-believe. This one is real.

This grief is irreplaceable, cut too deep, left to fester.

I have no words for this place of grief. But it gets easier. It gets easier. The wound does heal, bit by bit, brick by brick, love by love.

The trick isn’t in dismissing the thoughts of your loved one when they come. The trick lays in embracing those memories, but not as sad remnants of what death took. But as living reminders of a human that graced the earth and decided to fall into the open arms of your heart for the little time he had on his calender.

🫂🫂🫂🫂❤️❤️