Grief Is Love: Living with Loss

If you are able to extend grace to yourself to see yourself as the imperfect human that you are, full of the complicated feelings that accompany a loss, feelings that ebb and flow, you will be more able to extend it to others as well. When we refuse to offer ourselves grace and accept whatever we are experiencing, we make it harder to move through it, and we make it nearly impossible for others to effectively help us. Grief is a tricky beast, and there is no such thing as grieving "perfectly." Be prepared to extend grace to those around you, but most importantly, you need to extend grace to yourself.

Your grief is yours alone, but you don't have to manage every aspect of grief alone. You cannot do that. Give a voice to what you're feeling. Find the people who value you, and even if it makes you feel weird or uncomfortable, tell them some portion of your truth. Pinpoint the people who respect you and enable them to provide you with the support you need. Grief is nothing to be ashamed of. Grief is love.

Sharing my full truth became an essential part of my healing process, and remains that way, but it's a continuous journey in giving myself permission to grieve publicly and unapologetically. It does, at times, leave me exposed to people who don't know how to handle it, folks who offer unhelpful comments, opinions, or criticisms.

As I attempted to cobble together the former pieces of myself with what was left, I thought it was normal to feel sad for perhaps the first few weeks. I didn't know it was normal to feel sad on and off for years, for what feels like it will be for the rest of my life. I didn't know anger, envy, frustration, depression, anxiety, and shame were common elements of grief. I did not understand the importance of grace and the need to extend it to myself and others. I had no idea that grief was actively impacting my body and my brain in ways that made maintaining my health, my career, and my relationships challenging.

I couldn’t see a life lived without her. I couldn’t envision a world in which she ceased to exist.

Caring for myself is one of the ways I know I can make my mother proud.

Black women are taught to move through this country not only bearing the regular indignities and slights that come with preconceived notion of Black women, but also the scars of our history.

The rallying cry Black Lives Matter is fundamentally rooted in an absence of love. I thought about how much I love being Black and how much grief, anxiety, and fear being Black sometimes brings.

The truth is, you can do all of the right things and still not feel whole. For the most part, I knew "how to do grief" after my pregnancy loss, but when I'd check in with myself, I didn't feel like it was helping. I felt like a big fucking mess. I was still challenged to live my daily life, my grief blanketed everything, and I didn't know what to do. My new loss challenged my assumptions of what I knew about loss. I thought that I could rely on the muscle memory of grief to get me through this loss. Many people will say, "I've already been through the worst," or "I've been here before," but that's not how grief or healing works. You can't create a program around your pain or healing. Each new loss has a rhythym of its own. There are different waves and challenges for every occurrence in your life where you experience grief - whether it's through death or some other kind of loss, a breakup or friendship ending, losing a job. Any kind of loss introduces a new set of feelings and new requirements for your healing. Every new loss also has something to teach us, whether we like it or not. My pregnancy loss taught me that effort does not always align with outcome. I poured everything I had into getting pregnant - I literally let someone electrocute my fucking uterus - and it just didn't work.

The stability I had previously taken for granted was replaced by the pain that arrives when you learn that someone you love is going to die. It was a deep sense of foreboding, a bodily knowledge of things to come that you would do just about anything to avoid.

Women are described as the “emotional” gender, but I’ve found that women, Black women in particular, are very skilled at bearing feelings and suffering in silence. Black women have been doing it since we arrived on the shores in 1619. We swallow the pain of racism. We swallow the micro aggressions we experience at the office. We swallow the indignity that we feel when white women touch our hair. We swallow the fear and anxiety that comes with being wives, daughter,s and mothers to Black men and boys.

You are adapting to life without someone you love. You will make adjustments for your loss for the rest of your life.

You don’t get over love. Loving someone and being loved in return leaves an indelible imprint on your brain. It cannot be erased, because love can’t be taken away, can’t be taken back, even if our person is no longer with us in this world.

Grief experienced in intimate relationships and marriages is complicated. There was no escape from the pain and brokenness for either of us. He couldn't ignore my sadness, depression, and anxiety when they finally fully arrived, and I couldn't keep my envy at bay when he didn't share these emotions. Our ability to support each other was limited. We each processed the experience differently, needed different things, and at different times. I began to see how loss can break an otherwise stable relationship. Managing shared loss in an intimate partnership is deeply complex, and wildly uncomfortable, and at times everything will seem upside down. The relationship you've both normalized is pushed aside when you're dealing with grief. Grief impacts how you react to the world mentally and physically, and that doesn't stop with your relationship. Grief is all-consuming and requires your attention. Whether you are grieving the same thing or something you experienced separately, when grief enters the relationship, it can be lonely. You are different human beings, and either one or both of your are going through an intense period. There are plenty of opportunities for resentment to fester and frustration to produce fissures too deep to mend.