Hello,
I am sitting in bed, at 4.15am and I am not the remotest bit sleepy and my heart won’t stop pumping in over-drive so I think that I’ll write in here for a while. I hope it calms me, I am not even sure what I am exactly stressed about – all I know is that right this instant nothing will distract my brain or calm me so I thought I would just run with it. Like if you’re riding a horse that is chomping at the bit and spooking a lot, it’s really scary but sometimes if you say ‘go on then, just fucking gallop’ often the horse stops of it’s own accord and you make it home in one piece.
This week has been different. I haven’t cried at all, and I’ve been by myself in London with family members popping up to stay if they have meetings etc. I have got up everyday (admittedly late) and gone about doing things. I haven’t ‘thought’, I haven’t felt my sadness at all, I have been outwardly cheery and funnily enough - it’s been horrible. And now I inexplicably want to be sick and my whole body keeps cramping up pretty badly. I understand why people keep happy and busy when grieving, but honestly I have just a really ‘good week’ and I feel a new kind of awful now.
I am not advocating wallowing in sadness and cutting yourself off from absolutely everyone, but there is a difference between lying to everyone around you and lying to yourself. Most of the time I feel terrible and don’t really show it because it’s easier that way, for me and for everybody else. I feel like when I finally am honest with someone about how I’m feeling, whether it be just a tiny glimpse or a huge gush of emotion/explanation, in the back of my head I’m hoping they’ll then somehow help. I’ve asked for help, so now they have to give it to me. But it’s beyond most people, it’s too big and too huge and it’s not within their power to make me feel better, no matter how good their intentions are. So I tend to keep quiet.
So this week I extended it and started lying to myself as well. It is a whole different ball-game. My grief has been pushed away into this small blurry thing in the distance, I still think about dad every (on average every 2 minutes I would reckon) but it’s dialled down and muted; ‘Yes that’s very sad, now what should you eat for lunch’. And I grab and drag all these material things towards me to gobble up in the hopes that it will make me feel better – cinemas, food, shopping, drinking, smoking, calling an ex, looking good, music concerts. And now I just feel empty and panicked.
I don't seem different this week, but I have changed and (stupidly) I take this continuity in the way my family treat me as a sort of silent agreement that I should be happy and act like nothing happened. This makes me panic. This makes me want to run off into the rain like Marianne Dashwood after she was cast aside by Willoughby and lament in epic proportions. But if I did that I would just lie in the rain a bit and mope and then walk back and everyone would say 'oh you're a bit soggy hope you had a nice walk'. I don't feel it would carry the same dramatic tension as it did in Austen days.
I think I’m supposed to feel awful and broken, it’s natural and there is a beauty to mourning that you have to embrace. To see someone curled up on the floor actually howling in pain because they’ve lost someone does at least show you just how hard they loved them. It’s supposed to part of the process of healing – I don’t feel the slightest bit healed at the moment. In fact I feel raw and pushed around and forgotten about, but I am trusting and hoping that feeling this shit is supposed to be how it goes – at least, feeling anything else feels uncomfortable and wrong.
I’m going to now use the rest of this post as a sort of scrapbook for quotes about loss that resonate with me and made me cry or laugh, because I’m going to let myself feel before I go to sleep (and hopefully I will sleep as it is now 6.12am). I hope that some of them might make you feel more connected too, because even though most of us feel alone with our grief - there is a whole sea of people who came before us and lost before us, and seeing that their pain is the same as my pain is a source of inexplicable comfort to me.
Please keep reading my blog if I have in anyway helped you feel a little better, I think that connection with people who have their own grief not just sympathy for you helps so much - that's all I am looking for really. Plus, I have a lot more to say and I am going to say it because; “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.” (Macbeth).
“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”
(Edna St. Vincent Millay)
“She heard him mutter, 'Can you take away this grief?'
'I'm sorry,' she replied. 'Everyone asks me. And I would not do so even if I knew how. It belongs to you. Only time and tears take away grief; that is what they are for.”
(Terry Prachett, I Shall Wear Midnight)
“What if I'm so broken I can never do something as basic as feed myself? Do you realize how twisted that is? It amazes me sometimes that humans still exist. We're just animals, after all. And how can an animal get so removed from nature that it loses the instinct to keep itself alive?”
(Amy Reed, Clean)
“Though sorrow may impede my heart,
It is of great love to have known you.”
(C. Elizabeth)
“When you have truly lost everything at least you then can become rich in loss”
(Michelle Williams quoted this in relation to her husband's death)
“We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.”
(Sylvia Plath)
“If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.”
(Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights)
“But she wasn’t around, and that’s the thing when your parents die, you feel like instead of going in to every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone.”
(Mitch Alborn, For One More Day)
“My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That's just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don't get one without the other. All I can do is love her, and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy.”
(Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere)
“Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.”
(W.S Merwin)
“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.”
(Shakespeare, Macbeth)
“In time, in time they tell me, I'll not feel so bad. I don't want time to heal me. There's a reason I'm like this. I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won't smooth you away. I can't say goodbye.”
(China Mieville, The Scar)
"Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight"
(Marcus Aurelius)
“The woman who emerged was a trifle thinner, a great deal wiser, and an ocean sadder. This one understood the nature of pain, and beneath the glory of her features, there was character, and a sure knowledge of suffering.
She was eighteen. She was the most beautiful woman in a hundred years. She didn’t seem to care.
‘You’re all right?’ her mother asked.
Buttercup sipped her cocoa. ‘Fine,’ she said.
‘You’re sure?’ her father wondered.
‘Yes,’ Buttercup replied. There was a very long pause. ‘But I must never love again.’
She never did.”
(William Goldman, The Princess Bride)
“To live in the hearts we leave behind
Is not to die.”
(Thomas Campell, “Hallowed Ground”)
“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
(Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet)
Love, Smallhands X
P.s. Wish me luck, I have my first counselling session tomorrow.
