The disorderly nature of grief

An ode to grief in all it's perfect ugliness and beauty

Photo by Serene Arches on Unsplash

Grief is a funny thing because it does not hold to an organised timetable or a set process. Nor does it have rules or an organised process you must follow, before you pass through GO and get your £50.

You read the books, resource yourself. See a chart, it tells you grief does actually have a process; shock and denial, turning to anger, dropping into depression, reaching out to bargain, finally landing at arrival, back into the real world. Yes that sounds doable, I could handle that. Knowing that it might get worse before it gets better, but out the other side you come.

But grief doesn’t work like that. It has no obvious universal structure. It doesn’t follow a timetable. It isn’t kind, hand holding, ma larkin from the darling buds of may smelling of freshly baked cake and feeling like a warm blanket. Comforting.

No. It is not that. It is the craziness of A Beautiful Mind, the mischief of Cruella de Vil, the Dementors of Harry Potter, the Aliens from all the alien films, Kathy Bates in Misery, Miss Haversham and Darth Vader, all rolled into one troubled benevolent soul.

It is messy, disorganised, mischievous, cruel, untimed and untimely. It is both sneaky, playing hide and seek as well as being overwhelming. Nowhere and everywhere all at the same time. It’s torturous, messing with your mind, tearing at your heart, hollowing out your insides. Sometimes it makes you feel put back together again only to notice a piece is still missing somewhere and before you can find it to replace it, you’re back on the roller coaster wondering what havoc the pesky mother fucker called grief is gonna do to you now.

It cannot be controlled, scheduled or booked into quiet moments like running yourself a bath to have a good cry. No, it’s unruly with your calendar, arriving at the most inappropriate of times. It bites you on your bum rather than hold you in a hug. You think you’re over the worst then it shows you, you haven’t even started. And just when you’re getting to know it, it abandons you for a while offering some respite just before returning like a tornado to slap you around the face, leaving you feeling like a naive and exhausted twat.

Try and avoid it at your peril,

Shove it down,

Look the other way,

Turn the other cheek,

Suppress it under every other pain you’re already giving sad harbour to,

Slap on the fake smiles to the outside world,

Hold it all in - a balloon about to explode,

But nay, grief will not leave you until grief’s job is done.

It is the opposite of Mary Poppins. It will break you apart not put you back together.

Feel it we must. All of it. The full, brutal, painful, emotional, abandoning, hopeless, exhausting, deflating, heartbreaking, liberating, freeing, benevolent feels. All of it.

Because the only way out of it, is through it.

Grief looks and feels like a right asshole to begin with, but when we’re able to let it in, to accept it, to sit with it, to pull up a chair at our dining table, to look it in the eyes, we start to see that maybe there is light beyond the dark. That perhaps it’s here to help, not torture us. That if we take our time, to honour our feelings, not to judge, to label, to abandon ourselves or to pretend we’re something that we’re not.

To see our broken parts as beautiful parts,

To be grateful we can feel, so we can process,

To release, so we can find more space within,

The loss through the grief will eventually create a space for a different kind of light,

It will never be the same light,

That precious shape has gone or will never arrive in our lives,

Someone who loved and longed,

And lost.

But there will be light, none the less,

The simplicity of a new day,

The gift of being alive in this crazy world,

An opportunity to be someone good,

Someone better,

Just someone.

J x