Grief can be defined as a strong overwhelming emotion is the natural reaction to loss that is both a universal and personal experience. I think that grief is one of the weirdest things, and I think a lot of people can relate to that statement because no one experiences it the same. Although it’s a universal experience, it’s a personal experience first that you can then share with others who may be able to relate to parts of the way that you feel after losing something or someone. I think grief is the worst emotion; I think it’s worse than anger and worse than sadness, it almost is sadness but it’s so much more than that. Grief is something I think everyone in the world can relate to feeling, and everyone in the world can relate to how awful of a feeling that it is.
Grief is also a feeling you can experience from things like a divorce, loss of a job, the death of a pet, moving out of a family home, loss of health, and other feelings of loss. Grief if not only experienced by those who have lost a person and can also trigger things like PTSD and anxiety. It is crucial to take your time when grieving, as well as to reach out and find professional help if necessary.
I think losing someone when you’re younger and less developed; you don’t fully learn how to properly grieve people. When you’re not given the time, that will affect you for many years if not the rest of your life. In some cultures, it’s standard to grieve for a year or even longer and not for that period, you are in mourning. Everyone should be allowed this, but now we’re kind of expected to get on with our lives and forget about the people that we’ve lost. I don’t think it’s fair that we have a set amount of time that we can take off from work, that in no way allows us the proper time to grieve or mourn the loss of someone/ something important in our life. Then we’re just expected to come back to work or school and perform the same, we put on this façade so that other people aren’t bothered by our grief. This is just how I perceive it and maybe how I’ve experienced it, but I don’t think that this way of grieving helped me move on, if anything I still feel as though I haven’t finished grieving losses from so many years ago.
Talking about grief and mourning I think it’s important to recognize that some people don’t want a lot of time, and some people might not want to dwell on it. For others, myself included, I think that a lot of time is needed and should be allowed for us to feel everything and deal with it in that period of time. Maybe that’s not quite the right way to put it but allowing ourselves to go through all those emotions without consequence, without needing to show up for work or school, being allowed to stay home and be in bed, because sometimes it’s just what we need. Life moves on so quickly, even just day-to-day, and obviously when someone leaves your life, there’s a void, and that’s probably always going to hurt.
Grief is probably the scariest thing to me; I think scarier than death itself. It’s what comes after, and after losing somebody, that’s what I think is the most terrifying feeling. I think that most other people in the world can relate to that fear, but I just don’t think it’s spoken about in this kind of context. Obviously, death is scary, and death is something everyone is afraid of, but the fear of losing the people in your life I think is a far stronger emotion and collectively the way that most people struggle with grieving a lost loved one shows how universal it is to experience.
I wanted to include some resources for those who may be grieving, or still feel those feelings of grief long after losing someone or experiencing some form of loss and need some resources to help with that feeling.
https://www.camh.ca/en/camh-news-and-stories/coping-with-loss-and-grief
https://www.apa.org/topics/families/grief
https://www.webmd.com/balance/normal-grieving-and-stages-of-grief#2-3
Always be gentle with yourself in times of grief and think of others if they might be grieving as well.