What I wish I’d known about grief…
Grief isn’t just about you. It’s about everyone else too. You can contain your own grief — just about — but you don’t feel you can subject others to it as well. You think you can, and then you realise you can’t. And that you don’t want to. Whether the person you lost was good to you or difficult, it doesn’t change anything. The grief is yours. Yours alone.
Get up. Put on a brave face. You do it, even knowing that everyone around you can see straight through it — that you are living inside a coping bubble. Some days you dress down. Some mornings you wake up and think: I can almost see my old self. I just need to reach out and she’ll be back. And then other life kicks in. Stress from somewhere else, someone else who needs you. You put them first. And somewhere in that, you forget yourself.
Sometimes the grief is overwhelming and there is simply no one to talk to. Sometimes you just have to live inside it. And that’s all right. People will say they care — and some genuinely do — but until it happens to them, they won’t truly understand. Others will use your grief to process their own. That is not your cross to bear.
Just show up. Every day. Not for them — for yourself.
I never thought it would happen to me. And then it did. And what I know now is this: it wasn’t your fault. It was never your fault.
Ruppel
