It can feel like a rotting mass of mold and decay that we are doing our best to unload even though we haven’t a clue how to do that. 

It is often tied down by burdens that wedge themselves between us and our need to release it. It requires all of us, our minds, body, and attention and yet the world around us cannot grant us more than a day to acknowledge it. One day- and a lot of awkward condolences that leave us feeling upended no matter how we wish for closure. 

Alone it is anything but simple to unpack. The string that ties us is often frayed, split, or shredded. Fractured and frazzled, like our emotions we beg to understand. The string snakes into this moment, that comment, that person, this place. It winds and winds and chokes its way into places, then lies in wait for us to happen upon them so it can attack our naive belief we have found all of its traps. 

At its base, it is loss, love, hope upended, regret, guilts, and the calvalcade of emotion tied to the other. Maybe we could sit in it and soak ourselves away. Skin cell, by skin cell, sloughing off in the tears of our loss. But the dead dry skin flakes into the air, minuscule – so our eyes believe it to be gone, but our lungs have breathed in this pained DNA and taken on death in new ways with every breath we breathe. 

Life is seldom kind, and people have a way of complicating that which is already beyond comprehension. We know this, and still we do not know this. We do not pause to consider how this passing second is already gone as quickly as it began. Gone, gone, gone and to the next. People all around us, pushing us past this moment where we need the world to pause and caress us. We need life to understand our craving for death to enrapture the world alongside the loss we have had forced upon us. We need everything, every person, every task to simply STOP. 

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STOP for me. Because it is what I need. 

But the world does not stop, no matter how long and hard we cry for it to. The world simply pushes us to see the thing in a new way. Often another unflattering side of reality, but only when reality has shown its true face, in moments like this. 

So we see that some of it is marred with the external. That which has no place touching your pain. It could be expectations, roles, or others who have determined for you the best course of inaction. We do not decide. We simply ride the decision that was made for us. We do our best to stay aboard, though we were not given reigns, or leashes, or any ability to stay afloat.

Then there are the ones attached alongside us. The splintered threads that contaminate your pain and cloud your already muddled emotions even more. Maybe they don’t like the way you spoke of the one you lost, so you aren’t to say their name aloud. You weren’t as vital to their life in the eyes of this person. You didn’t hold weight. You were an inconsequential, even though the care you held was as deep as any could feel. 

Perhaps you’ve burned a bridge and aren’t able to attend to your adieus. You cannot wish them farewell like others can, because you have been left longing their presence while they still lived. Now, you will never make amends. You will never be done with this goodbye, because it would mean you cannot. You will not. You are undone with them, even though they are done with everything. The pain of this will never be unfelt by you and to put words around it would mean to admit more than you can bear. 

It does not care about any of this though, nor does it care about you. It exists during our deepest losses. It exists when we wish we didn’t. It lives in death’s embrace. It is the thing we battle, we fear, we wish would stay away. 

It is our grief.

Your grief, and mine. 

Stand still with me, while I weep in the shower. Turn the lights down and wish the world would sleep. Just for a second. Just so my heart can catch back up again. Just long enough for me to find my way back to myself, without this unrelenting grief.