Yesterday I was walking home from the train and my ipod was on shuffle, it started playing Lana Del Rey and I thought about him. He used to play her all the time at the office and dance around making funny faces. When we were bored he would just pretend to type and say ‘I can’t even’ jokingly. There were just so many little moments like those that formed the whole picture, it was just us, a world of our own.
Today while I was training the new person to take over his position at work, we found a pair of sneakers under his desk, I remembered he had gotten a new pair of shoes that last week he was alive. There are so many things left behind, and the feeling of wanting to see them again, never goes away.
It has been eight years since my first major loss - the loss of my girlfriend to suicide. She remains eighteen on my mind, her blonde hair now looks golden and her blue eyes pop a lot more than before as she smiles at me in my memory. However during that last year before her death, I remember her looking opaque, as if she was fading already due to her drug problem. He doesn’t feel nowhere dead, it has only been a little over six months. That’s half a year and I still find that mind-blowing. But I understand now that is the way that it works. There are no shortcuts when it comes to grief.
The combination of these events, listening to one of his favorite artists and finding his shoes, got me thinking a lot about grief. Sometimes I feel selfish that I have transformed my experiences with them as my own as I often write and talk about the impact their losses has had in my own life. They were so much more than that, I think. Perhaps it is because I’m an atheist, that I think of them as a life that stopped, there was a jarring end and my grief is a continuation of them. It’s frustrating how I cannot talk about them as I used to, all those conversations I used to have with other friends about him, about funny stories or trips we made together are now attached to the pity in their eyes knowing that he is gone. I may be smiling remembering a story that before they would’ve enjoyed, now it doesn’t matter what I say, it makes them sad and uncomfortable. In my experience, this is part of what happens when someone you love dies.
And what is grief? Is grief love? A therapist once told me it is a reflection of the love we have for that person. I’ve also heard grief is what we hold on to when there’s nothing else. Most of the time, I don’t have words to explain it. I’ve done crazy things while grieving. Not too long ago I grabbed his sweater and threw it on my bed to see the size of his body again. When I found his shoes, I was glad to see he had switched the old pair with the new ones, meaning he was wearing his new shoes and in the box I saw the other pair he used to wear very often. I was glad to see the dirt on them, it gave me a sense of closeness and proof that he was once here. Sometimes, I miss him so badly that I feel like I’m going mad, then I find these kind of things and I realize it makes sense because we were that close.
In the end, I guess I’m fine, I understand now that he is gone even though he feels alive, and the more I move forward the more it will sink in. I no longer feel like he will be coming back or that it can’t be right. The unfairness will never go away and neither will my love for him but he once existed, he existed in my world and had a major impact in my life. I’m sure, as time goes on, he will help me realize other things, death always brings so much awareness that it is impossible not to grow as a person while grieving.
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