i always think of the Growing Around Grief image by Lois Tonkin. while grief remains the same, life grows bigger around it. i’ve grown around my grief, around my mourning— both dead and alive. but when the grief hits you once again, you feel small. smaller than the grief that surrounds you. it gets hard to breathe. it feels inescapable. then you go to sleep with grief on your heart and you wake up and its a new day. a day full of growth. but then the night comes, you’re done with a full 8 hours of work giggling with your coworkers, and the grief welcomes you home with open arms as you draw yourself under the covers.
maybe it’s my inability to be alone, but i always laugh at my grief manifesting in the dead hours. when my door is closed and i’m shut off from the world, i close my eyes and there appears my friend. while i don’t think of loneliness as a friend (per my last post if you’ve paid attention), i do think of grief as one because grief holds my past friends, family, lovers, and it will hold my future. i think of grief as my friend because it is a part of me and what i will carry for the rest of my life. grief holds the memories of my best friend from high school. it holds the memories of my great-grandmother, my little cousin, a favorite celebrity, and the friendships i wished lasted a little longer.
it feels natural to sit with grief at night when the stars are not too bright because the city smog is too dense to see them, but you can still imagine them being there like you can imagine your grief next to you. grief is a little less of a friend when it greets me during the day when the sun shines down on me. seeing friend groups stroll through the park, big smiles on their faces, and you’re reminded of the friend you wished you had next to you. couples walking around the mall hand in hand and hearts on their sleeves, and your heart aches recalling when that was you.
grief during the day hits you randomly, unexpected. at night, I expect it and I welcome it. but during the day, I’m stricken by it. when someone writes their b‘s in a way that is all too familiar, when a song that you once to danced to comes on, when you drive down a road that you once had a different passenger, when you laugh at a post and go to press send and remember that person’s not with you anymore. when the sun’s out and the warmth hits you, you remember the warmth you once had.
grief is a funny little feeling. it manifests in ways you’re never taught. growing up, i always associated grief with a person physically dying and you mourning the loss of their physical being. but they never teach you the grief of someone that’s still living. the mourning of a relationship (whether platonic or otherwise) that was once your everything.
mourning over a person who still walks around is a little similar to mourning over the deceased. you still sit and wonder what they’d do if they were right next to you. you still search through your 20,000 photos for the photos of them with a sorrowful smile on your face as you recount the memories. you still dream of them. you still think of them. and even when you think you’ve gotten over the grief, it sneaks up on you on a random tuesday night and you’re listening to a playlist previously made for them and your heart aches.
but mourning over the living is also its own tale. a tale of dreaming of rekindling at a coffee shop with an awkward air and shy smiles as you catch up over the lost years. their smile is the same as it was years ago, but its changed slightly. its grown yet dwindled, as does life with the passage of time. its a smile you’ve known in your heart before but its become a stranger that you chase to get to know to put the puzzle back together.
mourning over the living is dreaming these fantastical scenarios of rekindling and being reminded even how small the world feels, it’s still large enough to be forgotten in the past. and it’s unlikely that you will run into each other as you hope to every night. and then you remember that even if you were to rekindle would it be the shy smiles you wonder about, or will it be tense and strained? will the air grow cold as you remember the fallout and the puzzle pieces lay broken and untouched on the floor— to never be put together again?