XIX. Grief
__You think you can just bounce back and keep to everything you planned on your path, but everyone who truly loved someone that has died always drops something. This post is about the mind when you do lose someone and how powerful grief is. My mother and father died in 2011 before I graduated college. My father’s was in January and my mother’s death was in July. I told them I would finish; essentially get those degrees. I did get those degrees, as I was double-majored, in December 2011. I wouldn’t ever tell anyone to do this because in order to finish and deal with what I was going through I dropped things. The ambition for the primary degree career was dropped. An overt focus on my mental condition, financial condition and physical health was dropped during the rest of that year while I fought to finish and get these degrees. I remember sadness being so heavy. And of course I am a Generation X, so there was no one to talk to, no one that you could talk to about you and help you because that person was busy talking about themselves and what they felt due to the death of your mother. My mother mostly, this was where my grief was the most deafening. I could not find a place to go in my head, as I usually did, after my mother died. But at the end of that year and the subsequent year, if it weren’t for the existence of my grandmother, I could have looked up and seen myself living on the sidewalk in a tent. Because when I was grieving, I was only looking down and inside not forward. I am thankful I was born with good fortune instead of luck; luck runs out. I made it back home with my truck and had a place to lay my head. So much time had passed so fast, that when I looked up again I was working online and from home but it wasn’t paying enough and it wasn’t good for my body. Time was wasted due to me making the mistake of going back and dealing with trauma. I realized when I went back to deal with these things why I never held on to them in the first place; it was a damn waste of time. All the shit that happened was because of other people making decisions around me. I couldn’t do much or anything about those things during that time. So when this foolish fog disappeared and I realized what real grief was, I said to myself, what the hell am I doing and got up from that stagnation. I sought my career position, my primary degree being Geography, so all things environmental. I applied to a position, got the position on-call in 2019 to 2020, applied within the same position for permanent work in 2020 and got the position in 2021. But time, so much time had gone by. Not only can grief be blinding but it can be a box. It had been since 2013; six years had gone by. These years went by this way because of me misunderstanding grief and exhausting myself. This led to almost every damn bad and incomplete decision I made. I was moving forward but entirely too slowly.
It was May 22nd 2022. My aunt and I were watching something on the television. WakeMed Hospital in Raleigh NC called me and told me my brother was in an accident. They treated him but he only survived until the end of the week. My brother was on his motorcycle on the left side of a two lane highway and a person decided not to yield before they drove out in the road and ran him over. He even threw himself and his bike down on the pavement to keep from hitting that person’s car, and although he and the bike still slid, this person could have stopped but they didn’t. It's a horrible journey when you lose someone; it’s hell. Another family member gone, dying and dead in a hospital. After the funeral, I saw my behavior become self-destructive. I saw what I term with that kind of grief, the four walls, which means even though you are not in a box you feel like you are. You have nowhere to go to get away from that pain. But also, I have seen this kind of grief before. I know how self-destructive it can be. It didn’t take a minute to see what I knew I should do and should not do. After three months I got called to work and because I understood the four walls I went to work. I had to be the oddest, most suspicious, or whatever, type of person these people ever saw. But that’s just the thing with grieving; there is no space or place in the mind for anyone and anything. I have always been a distant soul. Now, that has become much worse because I am constantly doing what I must do for myself. One of these involves writing; writing helps me in various ways and it always has. Walking through the pain of losing loved ones killed any useless concerns and any concern with appearing normal. I am happy to say I dropped the right things this time and I have no regrets. All the things to do with well-being and obligations are primary. Nothing else gets to be primary but contact with my cat, family members, and peace of mind. Now I know you may be saying, toni, oddness is home in you. Why did you write this shit? I just want to tell the people who find this and need some guidance to take losing a loved one very very very seriously. Years go by when you’re sad and filled with despair and you can end up in a situation that you can’t just step out of. And also, don't beat yourself up chasing grief and forcing yourself to remember every single bad moment after losing someone you love. The second reason I removed myself from that stagnation was because I experienced real grief. Real grief is different. There came a day, and it wasn’t any special day or anything, that I woke up needing my mother. My senses were searching for her with that heavy sadness in my chest and horrible anxiety but I knew she was gone. I felt like a child again, needing to see her, needing to talk to her and hear her voice, and all that time I’m feeling dread in my chest because I know the truth is she is gone and she is never coming back. On this day, I realized that this is real grief. The kicking yourself and feeling sorry about how things weren’t always perfect and our relationship wasn’t perfect and decisions were made that all weren’t perfect, is not real grief, it is a bunch of regret that don’t matter. Don’t cling to sadness in regrets. Real grief will touch you some day and you need to be ready. I was not ready. I spent most of the day trying to fill the hole I felt but nothing could. In the end, all I could do was sit down and need her, miss her, grieve, and go forth in this world as we all must.
If it feels good to you and is good for you; do it. Do things your way and allow yourself to have peace in what you do; all that you do. Whatever it takes therapeutically for you to get through this pain; do it. In life, on the bottom tier of the middle class, some of us must continue to go forward often times no matter what happens. Do that in peace and remember to let go of all the bad memories and hold on to all the good ones.