Before that day, grief’s sharp edges and hollow spaces were things I had only read about or seen in the movies; I had never imagined the grasp it could have on someone. Never imagined that it was something that could sneak into my life in the dead of night and steal my breath and shed me of my tears. I hadn’t known true grief until the day she left.
The day my best friend took her own life, I was left stranded in a strange, uncharted world where time seemed to mock me by standing still. I was left running in circles, trying to outrun a pain I couldn’t name or even understand. An agonizing, gaping hole was left in my heart when I heard the news. Her absence hit me with such a force, almost as if the earth itself had crumbled beneath my feet, leaving me clawing at the dirt to keep myself from being swallowed whole.
The world did not stop turning the day she left, but mine did. The sun kept shining, and the clouds kept moving through the sky. As I stood there in the wreckage of a life that I knew would never be the same. No one warned me how petrified and disoriented I would be after learning that my person was gone. There was nothing that could have been made right. For months, I refused to see the meaning of any of it. I was in pain, and I wasn't sure if it could ever be made less bearable. Everything I had taken for granted suddenly vanished right in front of me. What’s worse, there was nothing I could do but watch.
Grief rolled into my life like a heavy, thick fog. This fog of grief was an immovable force. I quickly realized I would have to fight through this fog every day just to see the next five feet before me. The grief I felt affected every part of my consciousness, making it impossible for me to think about anything else but her. All the lives we could have lived if she were still here. All the jokes we could have shared, the places we could have visited, the accomplishments we could have celebrated together. She had a brilliant mind that dreamed new realities every day, dreams that were big enough for both of us.
Sometimes, I’ll stop to wonder what that brilliant mind of hers was thinking that day. That’s when I’ll notice the fog surrounding me, suffocating me before I can answer my own question.
In the months that followed, the stages of grief revealed themselves to me, in their ugly, twisted ways, each one more haunting and impossible than the last. It was the opposite of the grief I had witnessed in books or movies; it wasn’t a slow unraveling or a quiet ache. No, it was louder; the grief was relentless. The stages of grief didn’t simply arrive and sit quietly with me; they didn’t caress my cracked heart. Instead, they came, one by one, pounding on my door in the dead of night, demanding insistently to be let in.
Each stage came like a visitor with no regard for time, no compassion for the fragile state I was in, and yet, I knew deep down they weren’t here to hurt me. Rather, they had to lead me out of the fog one step at a time, and that was an excruciating process. But a necessary one.
To grieve is not a unique experience, and I am not special for experiencing it. I have come to understand that this is the way of the world. Everyone aches for someone who is gone. Everyone carries shadows that they keep hidden under their smile. But I can’t fathom how everyone else seems to keep their sadness so politely, when some days all I wanted to do was set the world on fire.
This is the story of my experience with each of the stages of grief.