How I coped with grief
“Grief is not something you complete, but rather you endure. Grief is not a task to finish and move on, but an element of yourself, an alteration of your being, a new way of seeing, a new definition of self.” - Gwen Flowers
The past year was a transformative year for me, for it was a time filled with grief and growth. On 16 April 2021, my grandmother peacefully passed on in our home at the age of 103. What came 3 weeks later was unexpected – my mother was suddenly taken from us on 8 May 2021, due to a subarachnoid haemorrhage (bleeding the space surrounding the brain) caused by a spontaneous brain aneurysm.
Navigating the world with grief as the lens of which I saw the world was something that forever changed me. It is a new way of seeing, a new way of being and a new way of living. It became part of my intrapersonal identity, a state that transforms the emotional and psychological landscape through increased empathy, patience and gratitude. Through heart-work, I had grown around my grief and discovered new elements about myself and the people around me.
This is how I coped with grief, having lost my mother and grandmother three weeks apart at the age of twenty-three.
1. Taking Each Day, Moment by Moment
From the moment that we have lost a loved one – time stops for a moment. There’s a moment in between the news you received, and everything else that comes after, before everything seemingly falls apart and your whole world has changed. This often causes an overwhelming feeling of distress and deep sadness, which takes weeks, months or perhaps years to heal and recover from.
An affirmation that has helped me cope with the overwhelming change that grief holds, from both an emotional and psychological perspective, would be reminding myself to take each day moment by moment - to not think about how life would be in the next week, the next month or year, but just to carry myself from this moment to the next. Small steps, taking every step with compassion and simply allowing myself to be.
2. Reconciling Difficult Emotions
Grief takes a person through a plethora of emotions - from deep sadness and disorientation for the loss, to profound gratitude and love for the life that you still have at that moment. Before I got to the stage where I felt a sense of peace within, I had to put myself through the tumultuous process of having to confront difficult emotions of regret, shame or guilt for what could have been. Having to sit with these uncomfortable emotions was an incredibly abstruse and long process. It meant acknowledging the past that has happened, accepting the loss at the present moment, and realising how life will never be the same moving forward.
3. Closure in Perpetual Uncertainty
Especially in circumstances where the life of our loved ones had ended abruptly, we tend to look for signs that could have signalled us to prevent it from happening or to have that one more conversation or hug with them. This would only lead us to greater heartbreak of regret and guilt. Trying to find such closure in the ‘what ifs’ never leads to a good outcome.
Instead, what helped me to gain clarity and peace within was to have more conversations with the people who knew of the deceased, and to understand the impact of what the deceased had on the people around them. For me, I had multiple conversations with my late mom’s colleagues, friends and her closer relatives (whom I never had a one-on-one conversation with before). Doing this allowed me to feel her presence through the impact she had on others. I gained further insight into my mother and her life – and I learned how her kindness and love had a profound impact on the people around her in a way that I could have never known before.
4. Healing is Non-Linear
Many would cite the Kubler-Ross stages of grief, to understand how best to process this complex emotion and episode in one’s life. Though it helps us to be cognizant of what grief entails, it is critical to point out that healing itself is non-linear. There were days when I felt like I could not go on another day without my mother because the depths of sadness and grief got too overwhelming. On the days that did feel bearable, I felt some sort of guilt for feeling remnants of joy after the episode of loss. The past year had been a mix of all of that for me. It did not get categorically better over time, both in spontaneous bursts of euphoric episodes and quiet realisations. Through each episode and realisation, I gained a greater sense of peace in what has happened, and a sense of excitement for what is to come.
The past year has been an eye-opening, soul-crushing and love-soaked episode in my life, with many lessons learnt. I have grown around my grief, and I hope it stays with me throughout my lifetime, for it has developed a profound sense of gratitude for the life that I have, and the people and opportunities that I have been blessed with. Journeying with grief has been a beautifully imperfect experience, one that has allowed me to step into the woman that I am today.