10/26/2024
Early grief is an unmistakable pain that is hard to describe and even harder to get through alone and as Megan Devine says: ”You need someone to hold your hands while you stand there in blinking horror, staring at the hole that was your life”
If you're here, in the early days of grief (define "early" for yourself), and the universe has just split open and everything has changed, I'm sorry you're here.
I remember those early days. When the life you expected to unfold disappears: vaporized. When people talk at you and for you and around you, and not only do you no longer understand what they're saying, you no longer care.
Your life was normal, and then, suddenly, it was not.
It's like being in a crowded movie theater. Everyone starts out watching the same picture, exactly the one they bought tickets for, exactly the same one as advertised.
At some point, the screen rips in two, it shatters, and a whole new film begins. This one is surreal and strange, a horror show where there wasn't one before. The characters have changed, the stage set is wrong.
But the worst thing -- the worst thing -- is not that the movie has changed, but that no one else has noticed that it's changed. They are all still watching as though nothing has happened.
If you make a sound, if you say "Wait. WAIT -- this is all wrong now!" They pat your arm and whisper, "Shh. It's totally fine. It's just a movie. It'll work out fine. What a great story, and pass the popcorn please."
If out-of-order death has shown up in your life, here is what you should know: Early grief is largely this -- crashing again and again into a reality that can't be real.
It's an impossibility without release. There is no neat-and-tidy road map. There are no answers.
This is not the time for future plans. This is not the time for discussions about whether you will "be better later." Later is irrelevant. Now is all there is.
I'm sorry you're here. Others have come before you, but that doesn't really matter now. What matters is that the sky is wrong, and life is wrong, and you need someone to see it, to acknowledge it.
You need someone to hold your hands while you stand there in blinking horror, staring at the hole that was your life.
This sucks. It's all wrong. There's nothing to do but to hold that horror, send love down into that abyss. This is all so horribly wrong. And I'm so sorry you're here.
