I'm experiencing grief
a personal narrative essay by Chelsea Beller
Posted to Medium on February 9, 2022
I’m experiencing grief.
I’m not sure exactly what stage I’m in, but here I am. It’s a weight, like a weighted blanket over my whole body. It’s a grey looming puffy cloud full of rain. It’s the incessant buzzing of electricity in the background somewhere. It’s the base note of a cello resonating in my core.
I keep recalling the day I found out the reason for this grief. I lost a friend. He’s gone, and I don’t know why. That question hangs, floating around my brain. Why? What happened? We don’t know. We might never know. All we know is… he’s severely missed.
He was a coworker and a friend. We shared our lives, our daily anecdotes, our casual thoughts as we got through the work day. We would ask about each other’s partners, families, interests, and passions. He not only spent every moment at the job or worrying about the job, but he also had his creative aspirations that he worked towards every single day. How did he do that? He was an incredible multi-tasking dedicated and passionate human. I can’t believe he’s gone.
I feel his absence painfully. I feel it everyday at work. Every time I have to mention it to one of my regulars. I will say after a full week, it is easier. But I’ve still cried every damn day. It’s hard to imagine there’ll be a day I won’t think about him.
I think about him in different ways, from one moment to the next. Those stages of grief are in no way linear, I know that much. I can feel the foggy, muggy transition from one phase of this grief to the other. I feel a sadness I’ve not yet experienced in my life. I feel anger towards whatever it is that took him from us. I feel anger towards him, as well. That’s the toughest one to endure. How could I be mad at him? How dare I? And yet, it’s what I feel. I won’t deny it.
My boyfriend has helped me exponentially. He has gone through his own grief multiple times in his life. As devastating as those losses have been, he has been using his experience of loss to help guide me through mine. Selflessly lending an ear, a cuddle, and a kind word to me when I need it. I confessed to him a few nights ago that I was mad at my friend. ‘He left me,’ the sad little voice in my head said. My boyfriend reassured me he was mad at those who left him too. It’s completely normal. Every feeling I’m feeling is… normal. Validated. Normal, but not minimized.
If this kind of loss had happened to me before I met my partner, I don’t know how well I would be coping. I don’t think I would be accepting my feelings as “normal”. I would be isolating and self-medicating, any way I saw fit. It’s not just having a partner during times like this that helps — it’s having the right partner. The right person. I can confidently say my ex would not be as helpful. My feelings would be brushed aside to make way for his own.
To the point. I am endlessly grateful for my man, every day but especially now. It is paramount to have someone to talk to and understand what and how I’m feeling. In moments like this that are detrimental to how we keep going in this life, it’s important to have someone — a friend, parent, sibling, coworker, (or therapist, which I also have) who can hear you and validate you and accept you. Grief is possibly the most insufferable emotion, especially to endure on one’s own.
I hope you have someone for moments like these.
