I‘m not here to tell anybody how they should grieve, I think it’s a very personal thing and everybody should do it in their own way and in their own time. But I can give you a bit of advice based on my own personal experience.
The hard facts are –
- you will grieve forever
– Your grief will totally blindside you on an ordinary day.
- You will panic over just how overwhelmed you feel and the feelings you do feel are apt to be ones you didn’t realise were even possible to feel.
- You will also probably feel like you will never be the same again, which you won’t.
One thing I would encourage is to go with your pain, ride it out, let yourself feel all of the feels. Don’t try to stop yourself feeling the anger and the pain. I did this for quite some time, but the truth is there is no escape from feeling the inevitable.
Call on your friends. You might think they’re sick of hearing about it, you might think they can’t possibly understand what you’re going through, they most probably don’t. But sometimes you have to accept that you physically can’t feel it all by yourself, or you fear you might slowly combust.
I’ll briefly share with you my story. Almost five years ago I lost my dad to Sepsis. This was completely out of the blue and the biggest shock to my entire family. One Friday we were all headed down to a beautiful big house in Gloucester to spend the weekend together and the following Friday we were withdrawing medication and saying our goodbyes. This was all because my dad tripped over a small step whilst we were away and unbeknownst to us had contracted Sepsis. It wasn’t until a few days later that our lives as we knew it completely changed.
My dad was truly wonderful. I was unsure how I could possibly survive without him, sometimes I still am. I’ll never recover from the shock of his death, I’m unsure any of us will. Losing a parent is to alter your life forever, because what do you do when you lose somebody who loves you unconditionally?
Just today I sat wrapping my Christmas presents sobbing in to my sellotape whilst listening to Christmas songs. I love Christmas and even though it’s almost five years on for me, I still find the big anniversaries and festive season really really tough.
So I suppose my advice to you, the reader(s) is to teach yourself to not just exist without your loved one, strive to do great things for them. Include them in as many of your conversations, just drop them in whenever you feel like it. Don’t let them be a taboo subject, because the more we talk the more we keep them around. Especially talk to somebody who has been there, it’s always comforting to know you aren’t the only one feeling these things.
I’ll end this with my favourite quote of all time and I wish you all a peaceful Christmas,
Rachael x
“The reality is you will grieve forever, you will not get ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but, you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same, nor would you want to.”
