Grief Graffiti

“Grief had spilled me out in a wild, desolate, unknown place and I didn’t know if I would ever find my way home again. I wasn’t certain that there was anywhere on earth I could still feel was home.”

~Emma McEvoy 

This grief thing is so confusing. Just getting through the day or doing a simple task can be excruciatingly difficult & yet you feel as though you should be accomplishing something monumental in order to find some meaning to this existence without them. You literally don’t want to do anything & yet what you are doing doesn’t feel like enough. It’s a strange paradox that keeps you feeling inadequate at life & like you’re “doing it wrong” all the time.

If I am going to keep living here in this world without my son I need to know that there’s a purpose & a reason. Otherwise whats the point? If I am just going to go through the motions & barely make it through each day then why keep on living? When Tristan was born I got a built-in purpose. If all else failed & I never accomplished anything else in my life, I had him. Every single decision I’ve made in the 27 years since then were about & for him. Not a day went by without me thinking, worrying & praying for him. Not a moment went by without me loving him.

Now there’s this hole inside of me and it’s so deep and dark that, if I’m not careful, everything will fall into it & be lost. Some days it feels like the mouth of that hole is camouflaged & I don’t see it. But just one misstep, one slip & I could get sucked right in. Always feeling like you’re one breath away from the abyss, that’s what grief is like. So you’re always on guard, always a little anxious. CS Lewis said it so well when he said:

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the
sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same
restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

“And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps more strictly, like suspense. Or
like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a
permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I
can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had
too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty
successiveness . . .”

~C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Ironically it’s also the opposite. What’s that song, “freedom’s just another word for nothing left lose”? When you’ve lost the thing that you love most in the world, the thing you’ve always feared losing more than anything in life, nothing else can top it. No fear or worry could ever come true that could make things any worse. At least that’s how you feel. Death suddenly has no power over you, in fact that would be the easy way out. It’s the keeping on living that’s hard. It’s telling yourself daily to “breathe out, breathe in” when all you really want is to stop breathing altogether.