Grief over 18 years…..

It’s a long time. It’s enough time to become adult enough to drink.

It’s enough time for your life to completely change.

It’s also not enough time to take away the pain of loosing someone you loved.

It’s not enough time to take away the memory of finding them dead.

Their body cold, their breath that tasted like sweet almond when you tried to give them CPR.

It’s not enough time to forget how that felt.

I don’t know that there will ever be enough time for that though.

I don’t know that anything will take away that memory, that feeling.

No amount of therapy.

No amount of acceptance.

No amount of being busy.

No amount of love.

No amount of happiness.

It’s like breaking a bone that never truely heals, that still always hurts when it’s cold.

It’s like when you get a hole in your favourite jumper and try to mend it but the hole is always there, just covered over.

It’s like when you break something in Japan and fix it with gold, an ancient practice called Kintsugi, it may look more beautiful to some but you can’t deny it has not been broken, the cracks are clearly visible, but by mending the broken pieces it now has a beautiful complexity to it which wasn’t there before and wasn’t possible with out being broken.

There comes this depth of being when you go through something like that, especially at a young age.

It changes you.

It changes how you see the world.

How you see people.

How you see life.

You realise you don’t have control over anyone else’s actions.

You realise that sometimes love can’t save the day

Especially when they die by choice

Not by accident or illness, but by their own choice

The level of acceptance you have to reach to just live with this knowing

Some years the acceptance is there and some years it’s not

Some years the pain is so raw it feels like it just happened yesterday and the tightness in your chest makes it feel hard to breathe and some years it’s much more tolerable

I accepted this is part of my story many years ago, I accepted that chapter in my story, but that does not mean it doesn’t hurt

Grief is a strange beast, it is complex, it is painful, its many layered and it most certainly is not linear

Its more like a stock market graph

There is no right or wrong way to process and deal with it

There is only a place of acceptance

There is no way to completely take away the pain and hurt, that will always be there, there is only learning to live with that pain

Trying to control it, trying to stop the pain, trying not to feel it, all that doesn’t work, it will only make it worse

Instead you have to feel it when it comes, acknowledge it, sit with it and then release it

RIP Logy Bear