A Diary Entry on Grief:

A year ago, on the second last day of May, my father died.

Before it happened to me, the big grief, the important loss, I was so scared of it. I couldn’t fathom how life just goes on. But it does, it goes on. Because these things, time and life, are bigger than me and my feelings.

It wasn’t a typical grieving process; we weren’t close, and I was largely unsurprised by his death - caused, as it was, by a mixture of physical and mental health issues. What I was surprised by, and remain surprised by, is how little you can learn from grief by experiencing it. Nonetheless, I have attempted to describe the resulting thoughts here.

Perhaps the worst part of the aftermath of my father’s death is that only a fraction of my grief was actually related to him and the loss he represented. At the same time that I was navigating the realities of death for the first time I was also experiencing losses in friendship, changes in career, and transitions in identity. I was learning that my family was no longer, and had never been, what I imagined it was. I was letting go of a future I had always pictured. I was adapting to the absence of security I had assumed came with adulthood. And, perhaps most powerfully, I was grieving the world as I hoped it was: that the values I hold close to my heart and had assumed were more or less universal are, in fact, incredibly rare. I was grieving a vision of humanity that was humanitarian. These things coincided but were mostly unrelated.

2024 was a time of great and terrible transformation for me. And this is what I have learned grief always is: change. Grief is the most painful kind of acceptance. Transition is, of course, unavoidable. Despite this, we do a pretty good job of avoiding it. We rarely talk about death unless we must. We do not confront our innermost sufferings. We do not welcome expressions of difficult emotions. We live in a grief-phobic society, which means we live in a change-phobic society.

I usually try to end these posts with a moment of inspiration or empowerment, but I do not know that that kind of positivity is available here. In fact, I think that is the point. More and more, everyday, I am confronted with the terrible realities of the world. 2024 taught me not to fight it too much. Taught me that we are meant to be changed by terrible things. The person I am now, because of my grief, is wise and grounded to an extent I could not have imagined nor abided before. And indeed she has experienced suffering that was once unimaginable to me. Tragedy is now a word I am familiar with and desensitized to. Is this truly such a terrible thing? The experience of it was intolerable, but only until I learned to tolerate it. 

I believe this is how grief is meant to be: learned in pieces and in our own time. Just as joy is discovered moment by moment. My definition of suffering has been deepened and broadened by my experiences. As a child I had no framework, no reference, no idea, for the things my adult self can hold peacefully in her body. 

I never believed life is meant to be a series of continuously happy moments. That’s unrealistic and frankly boring. We need challenges and we need bad days. I do not believe, similarly, that life is meant to be made up mostly of hard truths - but I am learning that that is what human civilization has come to. Though, perhaps that opinion will change; As time and new experience inform me differently and I allow 2024 to fade into the background of my narrative. 

What Grief Is

Here is what I think I know about grief now: Grief and death happen no matter the issue of timing. We rush these processes in order to avoid them. We concern ourselves with the practicalities of death and distract ourselves from the experience of grief. Grief is rarely what we expect it to be. Instead, grief simply is as it is - with no correct answer or response or expression or emotion. As an Autistic I know now that I cannot grieve in a group without becoming completely overwhelmed, and most of my emotional processing happens in isolation. This isn't a bad thing, and it isn't a good one. It just is. Grief is absolved from judgement. Sometimes with grief there is relief, there is closure, there is regret. Grief, like the love that precedes it, is complicated and contradictory.

It’s true that grief is a terrible thing. But what’s worse is waging war on it. Forcing it down into submission, making it small. Trying desperately to change it into something it’s not meant to be. Refusing to be changed by it. Trying to control it: how it feels, when it happens, how it affects us.

I am learning that grief is about valuing our suffering, creating a home for it so it might live within us peacefully. Grief is about allowing painful transformations so that we might reach our potentials despite the difficulties we live through. Grief is creating a sense of acceptance despite how painful it is: Acceptance that nothing lasts forever: That we have no true control over the things that make us feel whole or make life feel full, things that may one day leave us feeling empty; That we are capable of the impossible. We are capable of continuing on and finding joy even as we harbor great sadnesses. We are capable of being changed by the unimaginable and ending up better for it. We are capable of bearing great loss and later finding new wonders which may not make up for those losses but can certainly fill our souls just as powerfully. That a thing does not need to be worthwhile to nonetheless be worth something.