I’m grieving, and I’m learning to grow around it.

And maybe if you’re reading this, you’re grieving too. Or maybe you know someone who has experienced a great grief in their life. 

The truth is, many of us are grieving all the time; grieving a person or an animal, the loss of a relationship, a dream that didn’t work out. Everyone has felt grief in some capacity, and for this I believe we should all try to hold each other as compassionately as possible. You truly don’t always know what someone is going through, despite how they may present themselves to the world. 

I have grieved all of the above in my life, but none of it came close to the grief of losing my Dad. An earth shattering event that has changed me forever, how I view things, how I operate, the way I feel about people and life. How to grow around the absence of such a beacon of light in my life, how to handle the shock of something so awful happening before I felt ready. I try to worry less about small issues and care more about the precious time I and others I love have here and what I feel makes that time worthwhile. I revel in the moments when my heart swells with love and cherish memories made that I’ll keep safe like trinkets for the rest of my life. 

And in saying that, there is an untruth - I do worry. Grief really makes you aware of the preciousness of life, how suddenly things can change, and how quickly you can be left in a situation you thought you were years away from. I struggle to stay away from existentialism, constantly worrying that I’m not loving hard enough, not trying hard enough, and that maybe I’ll experience a situation like that again. It feels hard to stay present sometimes when I replay the trauma of my dad’s death, or I fret over the future losses I will inevitably face. 

But when I think of my grief as tangible, a thing, almost, I’m reminded it is just that; an embodiment of love held for someone that no longer has a place to go. For a while, this space was huge, almost swallowed me alive. I couldn’t see an out. I couldn’t see a world where I could function knowing I could feel this pain again, that I could never put that love where it was supposed to go. 

Then I felt the soft touch of my sister’s hand on my head, the fingertips of my mother wiping my tears away, the smell of food coming from a friends kitchen when I didn’t have the energy to feed myself. The faces of my loved ones as I read my Dad’s eulogy at his funeral. I felt the embrace of my partner as I told him all about the man he would never meet. I heard the sound of the music my Dad loved, tasted the brilliance of the food he liked, and felt his presence when I explored my roots in the place he grew up in Ireland. I see him in everything, and as I continue to grow, I feel him there too. 

Through community and friendship, through the love and compassion of others and toward ourselves, we honour our grief by growing around it. We keep them alive through stories, memories and photos, and even feeling the grief itself. It is proof of a life lived with love to have left behind those who miss you so dearly! Through choosing to stay and carry on and to remember our loved ones in the small, quiet ways that we do, we embrace grief like an old friend, and make a home for it in our hearts. The love never leaves us; we just grow around it.