Gab, Meet Grief
Warning: My relationship with death has made me comfortable to say things that may make some uncomfortable. Protect your heart if needed.
Grief is a funny thing. One day, I’m frolicking the State College streets without a care in the world. And the next, I’m crying in the bathtub of my college apartment because it just hit me: my father is dead …and apparently, there’s no undo or rewind button I can press on that occurrence.
Up until that moment, my father’s passing was just something that happened to me. It was the same scripted scenario each time. I’d share, “Well, my dad passed away when I was little…” and then quickly counteract it with, “No, it’s okay. It was so long ago!”
(Thanks to time, therapy, and meditation, those protective responses such as “It’s okay!” are no longer in use.)
I would recite it as part of my About Me spiel to quickly get that fact out of the way. As someone with Aries placements (apologies to my non-astrology people), I have a common tendency to blurt out how I feel; otherwise, my inner world feels out of control. I’d casually share my life’s biggest trauma and carry on as if I just let you know my shoe was untied.
During the past twenty years, I never stopped to think about what I was saying.
Father— who was that? Who did I lose? Passed away, death—what?
What were all these words I’ve been using? I heard my mom use the phrase “passed away” growing up, and it felt like the only way to address what had happened. Died felt like THE bad word of bad words.
The many, many layers of this loss became clearer than I would’ve liked at the time. For a twenty-one-year-old girl who was so lost and insecure at the time, it felt like a ton of bricks fell on top of me.
Especially since the lost and insecure part was covered up with a cute Urban Outfitters crop top and never failed to be the life of the party. No one ever noticed, and neither did I.
After trauma, no matter when it occurs, the world is experienced with a different nervous system that has an altered perception of risk and safety.
In The Body Keeps The Score, Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD, explains how, even without our conscious awareness, the body experiences the adverse effects of its trauma from the moment it begins.
“Our gut feelings signal what is safe, life sustaining, or threatening, even if we cannot quite explain why we feel a particular way…If you have a comfortable connection with your inner sensations — if you can trust them to give you accurate information — you will feel in charge of your body, your feelings, and your self. ”
He goes on to explain that numbing the memories becomes an inevitable part of the process.
“However, traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.”
Detached from the facts and its many layers, my introduction to death and grief started to highlight all the ways I had acted out in life.
Things like my need for attention from the opposite sex, the constant search for validation and acceptance from all, and pretending not to care about anything…were all ways of my heart asking for help.
As someone who finds herself using a mix of spirituality and science to explain this life, the book’s explanations helped me give myself some grace.
Because death is already so heavy — and it left my mom with two kids under four years old, it was a topic that wasn’t discussed in detail. We regularly would visit the cemetery, and he’d come up in conversation, of course, but we didn’t discuss much in detail.
The act of discussing your feelings or hard things and taking time to process them is a foreign thing in my culture. You don’t discuss your feelings. There’s no time! Things happen, you suck it up, and life goes on!
Writing that makes me uncomfortable because I thought I had to live by that concept for so long. It hasn’t been easy or quick to unlearn that way of thinking. But pausing to read between the lines has put me on a completely different path, and I am so grateful for it.
I believe that everything happens for a reason—that everything happens for me, not to me. So apparently, there’s a reason? That’s weird to say, but you know what I’m getting at.
Finding acceptance in that wasn't fun, but it is essential to let go. When the grief finally hit me, all the moments I’d suppressed, watching my friends or cousins with their dads, started flooding in. All the comparisons and reminders of what I would never have were ALL. I. COULD. THINK. ABOUT.
I’m not going to lie; I’d sometimes think, “Hm, well, at least I got 1 out of 2 parents’ death out of the way without feeling the immense grief that comes with it!”
I realize how that sounds. I have a cozy relationship with death, so I tend to make jokes. Trauma and humor — they’re often intertwined.
Anyways, I was so wrong. The twenty years of suppressing the unknown came flooding in all at once. I remember the day so clearly, and I bet two very special people remember it, too. (Love you guys with all my Hart)
For some background, I lost my dad to lung cancer in 2001. I was 3 and a half years old. In 2019, I started to experience some dark, intrusive thoughts. All I could picture was the hospital room. What was happening the entire day of his death? What my mom must have felt like coming home to two babies. Dressing us up on his funeral day. What he must have felt knowing what was coming.
What the f**k??????? Where did all this come from?
Experiencing grief as the eldest daughter is another major factor of this uniquely challenging experience, accompanied by the most complex mix of emotions and responsibilities.
This past June marked 23 years without my dad and the 4th year I grieve. It still feels fresh as I only now understand what I’ve lost. And I’m just now coming up with a whole lot of questions.
I give myself the grace to feel all my feelings because I know to grieve is also to grow.
There’s a saying, “Grief is all our love that has nowhere to go,” but I find that saying not completely true.
Love is our whole reason for being here and there’s much out there needing the love we fearfully keep so close to ourselves. To love is to risk our hearts, but love also creates connections and brightens our lives.
The kindness and love I give others gives me the warmth I imagine my dad would bring me. So, I remain kind, with my heart on my sleeve.
What I’ve learned over the past few years is that grief is a deeply personal experience, and everyone processes it differently. I tried to heal while forcing my journey on my mom and brother, too. Since grief indirectly intensifies family dynamics, I had to learn how to set boundaries in order to protect my heart and our relationships.
Luckily for a sentimental junkie like me, my dad was just the same. He’s left me with albums for days to look through his early adulthood years. Looking through those and our family albums, visiting the cemetery solo, and accepting my random spurts of sadness have been a crucial part of my healing and mourning process.
There is no right or wrong way to grieve and no correct timeline for how it should go. I guess to wrap this up, it’s important for me to share that I know many of us, if not all of us, have experienced some loss and trauma that we’ve likely suppressed.
Suppressing our feelings and ignoring our bodies' messages is disrespectful to ourselves. We deserve to feel our emotions as they come and to give us space to notice how they manifest in our everyday lives.
Examine your inner narrative and give your heart what it needs. We all hurt. We all experience some version of loss. But we can’t let that pain harden us.
At the end of the day, I have my father’s features and my mother’s mouth. Within me, we’re all together, and that’s what keeps me soft.
