The fear of ‘feeling better’
‘When he’d died, I’d been so sad I’d worried I’d never feel better. Now I wished I was sadder again, because feeling nothing made me worry I was broken.’ - Freya Bromley, The Tidal Year.
Sometimes I think we equate the intensity of our sadness with the amount we miss our loved one. That the gut-wrenching, crushing feeling of loss we feel somehow measures our love for our person. The thought of this feeling no longer being so all consuming feels wrong. It’s as if when you are in the depths of pain, when it hurts the absolute most, that’s when they feel the closest. To miss someone proves we loved them. Therefore the thought of not feeling those things seems like an injustice, almost an insult.
People say that things get better, that ‘time is a healer’, and one day it won’t hurt so badly. In my mind, this sounds like a catch-22 - either I feel this way forever, which in itself is almost unbearable, or I surrender to the fact that one day it won’t hurt in the same way. Both sound as bad as each other. I have often struggled with the notion of ‘feeling better’ and the idea of sadness not being a part of my everyday routine. That one day, I won’t wake up thinking of my dad, or hear his favorite song without tears in my eyes, or accidentally set the table for four at another family lunch. Will it be a dishonor to him? Because in my mind, sadness equals love.
Experiencing grief is like being in a snowglobe. When you lose someone, everything is shaken up and this is inexplicably clear to those around you. But as time goes on, the initial chaos passes and things begin to settle. To the outside world, life looks as it was before - but only you know that nothing is the same and everything is in the wrong place. Life carries on, however you are left trying to cope with the changes and all the sadness that is left behind.
Different seasons, times of year, and life changes can magnify our grief, but they can also highlight that the intensity of feelings has changed too. Maybe you’ve found yourself enjoying this Christmas season more than in previous years, or perhaps you have more moments where the sadness isn’t so heavy. It can be easy to think this is a measure of your love diminishing for your person. We’re told that to grieve is to be visibly upset - almost paralyzed with heartbreak. The reality is that grief - especially when you’re young - is far more nuanced than society has time for. It ebbs and flows, and is certainly not equivalent to how many tears you’ve shed that week.
If you’ve lost someone prematurely, I’m sure you’ll be familiar with all the various analogies of grief and how it changes with time. There are some more helpful than others... But from all the metaphors I’ve been spoon-fed over the years, what I’ve come to understand is that the sadness doesn’t get any smaller, life just starts to get a little bigger. The size of the hurt is the same, but it's as if the corners are no longer as sharp. ‘Feeling better’ doesn’t mean moving on, and it certainly doesn’t mean you love them any less. You are learning to live without their presence, and naturally things that once felt unbearable, will one day become easier. That’s not to say that the intensity is gone. There are still days where my grief feels just as intense as it did the day my dad died. The difference lies in my familiarity with the feeling and my ability to sit with those emotions rather than run away from them. Sadness is not equivalent to love, and it’s not a worthy measure of how much you miss your loved one. The trajectory of grief is not linear, but more of a zig-zag.
As I began with a quote about grief, I want to end with one too - a particularly beautiful one might I add:
‘I am no longer surprised that my reservoir of grief is so full and refillable. Because I am no longer surprised, I am much better able to live with it. I weave it into my days, I can cry and laugh at the same time.’ - Cathy Rentzenbrink, The Last Act of Love
