Once again, I’m putting a disclaimer/trigger warning at the beginning of this post. These words are painfully honest and broken, but they are meant to be shared. So please read at your own discretion.
What they don’t tell you is:
Your grief will come in waves.
Some days you will be perfectly fine and enjoying life in such a way that people would question whether or not something tragic has recently happened to you.
But don’t let that deceive you.
Two hours later, you can find yourself completely falling apart and on the verge of making a thousand terrible decisions.
What they don’t tell you is:
You will find out details of things that were going on in your mom’s life the days and weeks leading up to her death that won’t sit well with you at all.
What they don’t tell you is:
You will write painfully honest and broken words and leave them in your youth pastor’s desk.
You will immediately regret writing it and leaving it for him as soon as you get home.
Your anxiety will be through the roof until you get a response.
Your anxiety will still be through the roof even after you get a response.
What they don’t tell you is:
You won’t give two craps if you relapse. You won’t care how close you come to that line.
No one prepares you for what life looks like after you bury both of your parents in the short span of twelve years.
People will try their best to offer advice, but in all honesty, they don’t know how to deal with it any more than you do.
You will get so tired of hearing the same cliches over and over again that they will actually start to make you nauseous when you hear them.
You will also have an overabundance of sarcasm and sass. See previous sentence.
You will try to make sense of the events that have unfolded, but will never be able to.
You will keep yourself so incredibly busy that you really don’t have enough time to even sit down and catch your breath, and your body will let you know that, but you won’t care, and you will keep pushing yourself.
Sleep becomes your enemy and you will have a love-hate relationship with it.
Your body will avoid it at night at all costs, which does nothing but lead to a host of unwanted thoughts, and it will turn around and crave sleep during the day, but you have a life and responsibilities, so napping all day isn’t an option.
You will make sure you keep your cardigans handy.
You won’t need to go into details about why.
You know that people aren’t stupid, but neither are you.
This isn’t your first rodeo with this, even though you thought the previous one was your last.
This one is different on every level. And this one scares you at times.
This time only one person knows how serious it really is.
And that’s for the best right now.
You will struggle to open up to people about how you’re really feeling.
You won’t even know where to start to talk to them, and you certainly don’t want to impose on them.
You come to the conclusion that you have a hard enough time trying make sense of it for yourself, much less try and explain it to someone else.
So you’ll just decide not to.
It saves on the headaches.
You will give advice until you don’t have anything else to offer, but are unable to take your own advice.
You will tell people that they are loved. That they are valuable. But you will have a hard time owning those words for yourself.
You will again have the underlying anxiety that people will begin to bombard you because they are concerned for you.
While you appreciate their concern, and you really and truly do, you can’t handle being smothered.
The more you’re smothered, the more you will shut down.
But in the end, you know that this is a day to day process.
Some days are good.
Others are bad.
A lot of times the good and bad happen in the same day.
You know that there are parts of this that you are still leaving out.
Things that very few people know.
Things that I’m not quite ready to be completely open about yet.
But they are things that you will eventually share.
Because grief demands answers.
But right now, I don’t have any for them.
What I do have is brokenness and struggle.
But I don’t carry them alone.
And for that, I am thankful.
Hope Whispers 