As I sit down with my laptop in front of me, I find myself clueless about how to start this post. What I aim to discuss is incredibly heavy and hard to understand. I mean, mourning and grief are impossible to describe unless you yourself have experienced it before. And it doesn’t help that it is different for everyone, everyone deals with it in different ways. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let me first try to explain these unexplainable topics.

Let me start with grief. Grief, by definition, means, “deep sorrow, especially that caused by someone’s death.” (Little on the nose don’t you think?) But while that is a good definition for grief, it fails to describe exactly how grief feels. I’m talking emotionally, mentally, and even physically. There was many a day I woke up and felt there was a thousand pound weight sitting on my chest. And that’s just one thing. But generally, emotionally you feel destroyed, mentally you are shattered, and then just to add insult to injury, your body itself feels like a cage. It is one of the worst things I have ever experienced. And it is just that, what I experienced. For every person this feeling of grief is different, for someone else they may get horrible migraines, they may joke about it to cope, it just depends. And there is no one right way to process grief, you just have to let yourself process it in whatever way is best for you.

I feel I am jumping around a bit so let me re-center myself. We all have heard of the 5 stages of grief: denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance. The common idea is that you go through them in that order, and once you get to acceptance your grieving process is done.

Well let me tell you that is a load of crap.

I have jumped from depression back into anger, from acceptance into denial, and I’m not even sure I have touched bargaining once. These stages are not stages in the least bit, I think you’d do a better job picking the winning lottery numbers than determining what stage you’re going to be in next. Grief is fun like that; it loves to throw any sort of logic out the window. And you just have to roll with it, because if you don’t allow yourself to grieve in whatever way you need to you’ll end up even worse. Such is life I suppose.

Moving on to mourning, it is traditionally shorter than the time you grieve (which mind you, could be years), but it is still an incredibly prominent part of losing someone. Mourning and grief are incredibly intertwined, which as this site says, “grief is what we feel, and mourning is what we do in response to that grief.” Now I know that is still a bit confusing but hey, so is grief and mourning. Back in the olden days, mourning was more ceremonial, with it including wearing black clothes, the funeral itself, and other types of rituals. And while that is still practiced in some cultures, widely nowadays the definition given is the true form of mourning. But as stated, mourning is much more the outward expression of grief. Crying, screaming, yelling, all that fun stuff. And just like grief, you need to let it out in whatever way you need to. Sometimes you need to cry, or scream, or yell, or what have you. We are human after all, we do have emotions (as long as you’re not a psychopath) and we need to express them.

I know that for myself I tend to not express my emotions enough. I keep things held in too often, which often leads to it exploding all at once. I need to cry more, speak my mind more, talk about what is impacting me. Which recently, that has been the loss of my father. I have talked about it before, but I do not think I truly fathomed how hard it would be without him. These past few months have been some of the hardest of my life, and while I do think I am handling it decently well, I do crack. I am still grieving, which I feel many people do not realize. I am not okay, I am missing one of the most important people of my life and will for the rest of my life.

I was talking to a friend recently, someone else who has lost a parent actually, and we were discussing the many different aspects of losing a loved one. One thing we discussed was how it can be hard talking to others about our parents passing, as others don’t know how to respond. And it is true, people who haven’t felt this pain don’t know what we are going through or how to respond, but I don’t expect them to. Truthfully when I talk about my father I simply want people to listen. Listen to me reminisce, listen to me grieve, listen to me talk about this incredible guy who I was lucky enough to call my dad. And I think that is what the majority of us grieving want, someone to listen to us. And maybe a hug too.

Grief is one of the most extreme emotions a human can experience, and one the majority of us will experience in our lifetime. I just happened to be lucky enough to experience it this early in life, oh lucky me. But to those who are also grieving and mourning, you are not alone. We will get through this one way or another. And to those who aren’t, well lucky you, but also listen to those who are. And for the love of all that is good do NOT say you are sorry, I know me personally I have heard sorry more times than I can count. I mean what am I supposed to say to that as well? “It’s okay,” no it most definitely is not. But I digress, just make sure you listen and give a hug when needed.

I think if I write anymore, I might go blind from all the tears I have shed writing this, so I think I will end it here for today. May God bless you all, and I wish you all the best.

(The Long and Winding Road by The Beatles)