Planet Grief

Grief brings up feelings one would never even begin to imagine, why would you? Unless you have lost someone who is an extension of you, of your life story since you can recall. Think of it as one day you wake up on another planet. Everyone looks the same, perhaps even acts the same, but you can’t seem to comprehend anything that is occurring around you. You have to work so hard just to get through each day. Everything is heavier, like you are trudging through this muck that is only present for you. You smile, oblige people, mimic their actions but all the while all you want and desperately need to do each day is make it home to your bed so you can collapse. The problem is even your bed feels different. You can’t seem to sleep, you toss and turn and find yourself exceptionally anxious, you feel like an observer in your own life, an outsider peeking in. You exist, but you are not really sure why or what for. You walk this magical line between acting like you are supposed to be on this planet yet secretly knowing you don’t belong. You try to fit in for fear of being exposed for the true alien you are. You carry this invisible yet extremely taxing appendage called Grief and you are so intensely aware of your dysmorphic state every second of every day yet you also acknowledge the necessity to keep it under wraps to not upset the balance, the tone of this social structure which you come to realize is not really a new planet after all but rather you got knocked off, tossed into the stratosphere and all of this drudgery is the work of attempting to realign with society as the newfound Alien you are.

Carrying grief is personal, it has no manual for how to play it out. Your entire life events, experiences, relationships impact how you will carry your grief. But here’s the crazy thing, you cannot prepare for it. It is not a test. It doesn’t matter if you did everything right, dotted all your I’s, crossed all your T’s, had the deepest faith, the best “everything happens for a reason” attitude. You don’t get to pass to the front of the line, to be the best griever. To do it more efficiently because you did everything right, nope, sorry folks, it doesn’t work that way. Once you experience your loss, your greatest pain, it is like BAM!#! SYSTEM FAIL!#%&!, you are stopped dead in your tracks. Your screen is wiped clean, you lose all your data, there is nothing to save. You are suddenly hurled from all your anchors of false security into the abyss. Planet Grief is your new home. You have to McGyver your way out of this. You search for clues, you grab hold of whatever and whomever you can, you ramble on to strangers, any one who will let you talk, without even recognizing your own words as they spew from your mouth straight from the darkest corners of your soul.

At a year and a half into my own grief abyss, I now have days where my feet are on the ground. I still have days where my entire body is on the ground, when the intensity of my loss drops me to my knees. I am also learning to walk that magical line between the world before Glenn got diagnosed with Cancer, suffered insanely and died and the world I have to live in now where I am all too aware of how little anything we do or don’t do here on this earth really matters. How you can do “everything right” and your future may still not be bright, how we can believe that things will get better but know that they might not, that our best days may have already happened. Once you experience the loss and pain of your person, the luxury of this belief system is no longer afforded to you. Now you may be reading this and be thinking, “oh this poor women is so negative, she needs her faith, etc” but please allow me to finish. My statements are my truth, they are my new reality. They may make you uncomfortable, but please don’t feel sorry for me. I also understand at the most cellular level that every moment is a gift, it is now embedded into my soul to practice the art of gratitude. I long for human connections in a way I could have never imagined. My actions and interactions are more genuine, I feel the earth beneath my feet, the sunlight on my face as I look to the heavens every time I speak to Glenn. How many of you look up each day and acknowledge how very small you are, that we are part of something so much outrageously bigger than our human minds can even allow us to imagine? I do…every day since Glenn left this earth and in that moment, that moment at 11:55 pm December 9th 2018, that he looked me straight in the eyes, into my soul and took his last human breath, I understood in that moment, that his essence, his soul, had to have gone somewhere….So don’t ever feel bad or let down by my words, after all, they are just words, how you decide to interpret them lies in your own life experience. At some point it is inevitable that most of you, if you live long enough, will have to be on this Planet Grief with me someday.