I have written about death and grief a lot. What I haven’t written about is why I’m personally grieving. People that know me in an offline way have details, but no one knows everything… except me… and that’s the entire problem. It feels like I’m locked up, and when I try to express my emotions, I get a range from “God, I am so sorry” to “get over it.”
Because that’s how grief works, right? You just say “snap out of it” and people get it. People have been CURED over “snap out of it.” Yes, that was extreme sarcasm. I have a hard time not screaming at the people who tell me to just get over it. Seriously, who the fuck has the right to say what my process is or should be? Relationships take a long time to get out of your system if you’ve known the person for one year, much less 25.
So while you’re saying “get over it,” I’m saying “I will… but in my own time. Shut the hell up.”
My favorite way to grieve is to go to the places that the person I lost would meet me. The places that are “ours.” When I get there, I just start talking. It doesn’t matter that they’re not there. My grief is not *for* them. I know that sounds funny to say, but especially since my grief is for a friendship that ended and not a person who died, it doesn’t matter to me whether my friend is with me or not. I just talk, anyway.
I have to feel that in some small way, the universe is holding my stories. I have to believe that by getting them out of my body and out into the ether that one day, I won’t have to hold onto them anymore.
But I don’t just talk about serious things. Sometimes I tell myself jokes and stories between us that make me roll on the ground with laughter, and those are moments I cherish, because that means that it is *just* grief. I am not also trying to be angry, because why be angry? What’s it doing for me? I have been angry about this situation for years, and it’s never gotten me anywhere. That’s how I had to decide to let go of the friendship altogether. I realized that I was putting someone else’s happiness above my own, because that’s what I thought I needed to believe.
We met two months shy of my 13th birthday. I am now one month away from my 36th. There was an 11 year age gap between us, which we both did our best to bridge. Because of this, information passed between us as equals. Because we are both so damn funny, it covered up some real emotional scars for many, many years- I was living vicariously through an adult, and a lot of it scared me.
When I got scared, I would do what I could to protect her, which wasn’t much… but it was what I could do.
I could listen.
I thought I was helping her by being that friend she could always go to for comfort and solace. In retrospect, I realize now that it helped me to grow up too fast. I felt like I was becoming responsible for her behavior instead of it just being reported. I took on the mantle of trying to take care of her, but she didn’t realize that her stories had that kind of impact on me.
I was so young when the pattern started that it is just now occurring to me to stop. It is excruciating, this major emotional surgery. It is my life’s work to unpack 25 years of memories and take them all in stride.
Because that’s just what unconditional love does. It allows you to look at all sorts of memories without being threatened by them. It allows you to see yourself as you are in your interactions with others. It allows you to love yourself as much as you love everyone else.
Which sounds so hippy-dippy and weird for someone who’s moving back to Texas.
Stories That Are All True 