The Grief Experience
It wasn’t until a friend announced her pregnancy on social media that I started to conceptualize how deep my grief was. Watching people’s lives move on and big life milestones occurring really forced me to pull the blindfold off. It wasn’t that I hadn’t acknowledged the reality of death and loss. It was that I had been just looking at it in between all the other bullshit that I had to process and tend to for the first six months of this journey. it was like I saw it and knew it was there looming, but it was just in my peripheral vision, just out of reach.
The pregnancy announcement shook me. I never wanted children and still don’t, but knowing now that it will never be an option was heart wrenching for me. The impossibility of what once was possible grasped me by the throat. I saw green. I have never felt so jealous and angry in my life. It wasn’t just jealousy for my pregnant friend. It was jealousy of everyone around me who just get to move on with life and experience more firsts. It is watching people accomplish things and live when I don’t get to. It is heartbreaking to realize that you’re never going to accomplish your dreams and hit milestones that others are experiencing.
There’s the grief within me for all I will never have nor experience. I try to hold onto all the things I can have, but every day is different and the heaviness of what is possible varies. Sometimes I’m struck with visions of the future and what it looks like without me. My mom picking up the photo of us that I display on my shelf, my dad packing up my art, my siblings, my friends, everyone experiencing the loss of me. It’s heartbreaking to know I won’t be able to be with them in the physical realm. I don’t know what comes next, no one does.
I want to believe there is something, some way to stay here with the ones I love. Maybe I just stay alive through the memories they have of me, maybe my spirit lives on. I am not sure, but I keep hoping for something. Someway to move on and still stay at the same time. There isn’t enough time. There isn’t enough of anything that can make this okay.
I think the most difficult part of this is the way people look at me when they find out about my eventual passing. It is a mixture of pity, worry, and sadness. I often find myself trying to ease their worries when the look arises. I don’t know why I do this - probably to ease the hardness of the conversation. I struggle with this as much as one can imagine. The things I am losing, the things I’ll never have or experience, are things that I think about and mourn often. I try so hard to be strong and carry myself with the determination that I’ll beat some odds. I think when that face appears, I just try to offer some bright side to this situation to the receiver of the news I’m delivering - to ease the burden of knowing someone is dying or to make it sound less awful than it is.
I feel differently about everything each and every day. I like to joke about it mostly because I don’t know how else to deal with it. I do have my moments where I talk about it more heavily, but it is something I only do with close friends and family or doctors and therapists. It’s a conversation that I save for people who are closest to me and this process. Not everyone needs to know the specifics of my pain, but it is important to shed light on what is experienced in moments I have alone or in quiet conversations with loved ones. I think so many people don’t see grief as messy as it is. They hope for a process that goes through the stages in a clean way, but grief is not linear and it doesn’t always have a neat and tidy stage. Sometimes grief is felt with a multitude of emotions at once drowning you in what feels like endless grief. Everyone has their own way to work through it, but I don’t think the people in my position experience grief in the same way as the ones who stay alive after we pass on. I think we experience fear, anger, denial, and bargaining for sure, but acceptance… I’m not sure it is something anyone terminal can get to. Maybe when one is closer to the end it is possible, but I’m less than sure that acceptance will ever honor me with its presence. It feels impossible to be okay with dying knowing so much is going to go unexperienced.