Blog 20: Loss and Grief

To say that I, an eighteen-year-old, have accepted and understood the full concept and emotional stages of grief would be foolish. However, I have suffered a great deal of loss in my life and have endured a significant amount of suffering as a result of it. Each person's experience with grieving the death of someone they cared for so deeply is different, so I cannot tell you when it gets better or when it stops hurting. I understand the agonizing, gut-wrenching feeling you get when someone mentions someone who has passed for the first time and you find yourself fighting back tears; I've been there. On several occasions. I’m not here to claim that I’m an expert at grief and all things that come with it. This is because I truly don’t believe that we all handle grief the same. Despite experiencing the same loss, we could all perceive and interpret it differently. I’m no stranger to death. I’ve grown up around it, we experience it every day. Whether it’s someone we’ve known and loved or someone we’ve never met. It’s all around us. There’s this conception of death that has stuck with me for a while now. You can visualize a wave in the ocean. When sunlight passes through it, you can see it, measure it, and see how it refracts. It's there. Seeing it, knowing what it is. It’s a wave. Then it crashes into the shore, and it's gone. But the water is still there. It was just a different way for the water to be, for a moment. The wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it’s supposed to be. We’re all here for a specific amount of time and we impact/have an affect on everyone and everything that we come across. And then one day it’s done, we’ve experienced whatever we were supposed to experience and we’ve lived. Time heals everything. Soon enough the pain and the grief won’t feel so heavy and even though you may carry it with you, it won’t hurt as much.  But before I go I wanted to leave you all with this- remind everyone you love that you love them. All the time. It doesn’t matter if you think it may be annoying or overbearing, I swear to you, it’s not. All anyone ever wants to be is loved. We all want to be reminded of it and we want to feel it too, even if we don’t feel as though we deserve it or that we’re capable of being loved. So tell whomever you love that you love them, time and time again. Every day, several times a day even. It’s the most beautiful feeling in the world. I promise you it’s not obnoxious or repetitive. Being told that someone loves you and that you’re cared for is the loveliest feeling of all. I love you all.