Living In the Shadow of Grief

Grief is a life long journey no one is ever free of. It may find you when you are young or it may find you when you are old but overall it will be a ghost that visits you before you leave this world. Grief is a lingering essence that colors your world and changes your perspective. For me it began when I was five and it changed my humble little child life in the blink of a season. So, I would like to speak of growing up in grief…

I am a survivor of my family. My family did not survive. My family quickly unraveled one year when my sister was three and it was laying in the ashes that burned it alive by the year my sister would have turned 5, but she never made it there. That time of less than a year seemed like my entire childhood but it wasn’t, it was just a glimpse of time that laid bare all of the hearts involved. People say the death of a child is the worst thing someone can experience and I have no direct experience of that but what I do have is the death of a sister, the death of my mother’s empathy, the emergence of my father’s apathy and the death of a family. I’m the only survivor. My mother unplugged for good when my sister died and my father recoiled far inside his shell. My family abandoned me far before my sister’s death. All I know is losing my sister set it all in motion. Even before they knew she was going to die- she knew she was going to die and she did what children do that know they are dying they push the people away that show too much fervor for life and that unfortunately was me.

This is what I want to say….when one knows profound grief as I have, one doesn’t wait for tomorrow to do this or that. A person that knows life is finite and can be lost lives every day not taking it for granted because tomorrow may never come. This is me…I hate to wait for anything…because in my mind, if you wait it just may never happen, you could be dead by then. I’m not impulsive, I don’t have FOMO, I have dreams in life that I pursue and don’t wait for everything to be right. It does keep me from being stagnant but it makes the challenges harder and the people you love always guessing what you are pursuing next. I don’t sit still and wait for life to happen I go out and grab it by both horns and hold on. Of course, I am not suggesting this as a good life pattern or the best way to live it is simply just the way I live. I live this way because I don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow. I don’t know if I’ll never see someone again. There has been so much loss in my life I really can’t be certain of anything in the next moment. I don’t like to be told to wait for the anxiety of what ifs start creeping in. I think the fantasy most people live in is…there will be time for that, but what if there isn’t. One thing we do not control is when we or anyone else will die, because of that every moment DOES count, every conversation matters, every moment shared, picture taken, sentiment stated it matters. Some people live with the guilt of the last thing they said to that person they lost before they left and that is such a horrible thing to live with but they were not thinking they would lose that person they were just living life without the thought it might change in an instant. The reality is lots of people die every day and those people are more than likely loved by other people.

So maybe my excitement over today seems over the top but I think there are others out there like me that know just how precious and finite life can be so they live each day to the fullest. They are people that don’t hesitate and miss they’re opportunities because they can’t last forever. There is a balance in this though you have to balance living the potential last day of your life with the concept that you may also be here tomorrow and you may live to 100. So what, at least when you live it you won’t have any regrets over it. If you wait for it to happen you’ll probably have an endless list of regrets.