You think because you have “imagined” it, you have an inkling.
But you don’t.
You can’t.
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind.
~Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
This was one of the most surprising things to me-that in spite of all the books I’d read, movies I’d seen, people I’d known (who had grieved a loss in my company)- I knew absolutely nothing of grief.
I did not know it would totally destroy who I was-leaving bits so small that I had no idea how to put them back together.
I did not know it would so completely block the light of the sun that I wouldn’t be able to tell day from night.
I didn’t know that it would change the taste of food, the smell of flowers, the sound of the wind so that everything I tasted, smelled and heard was death.
Thankfully, slowly, the bits have come back together and formed a semblance of the me that was before.
Before grief.
But not really the same. A hollowed out husk of who I was. Familiar shape without the substance.
I’m learning to live with the me that’s left.
Holding on to hope.
Leaning into love.
Original artist : Albert György
Bronze Statue located at Lake Geneva, Switzerland
thelifeididntchoose 