Grief

***Take this with a grain of salt folks. I am not suicidal, just really had a lot of time alone to think this weekend***



Do people really die of grief? I know my great grandparents died within days of each other. I have read books where people died of "so called" grief. But is it true?

I remember crying uncontrollably when I was 5 or 6 at the thought of my grandfather dying. He died when I was 16. It was a horrible feeling. Yet here I am. I think of him only fondly now.

I remember thinking I couldnt live without my best friend Karine, and when she died of leukemia at the age of 21, I thought my world had ended too. I walked around in a haze for months. I really didnt know what I was doing. Still, here I am, writing about it matter of factly.

Does everything traumatic end up this way? What makes people able to handle so much grief yet go on with life? I really dont know but I have done it. I have walked away from things I really didnt think I could handle, things I thought would surely break me, and gone on with my life.

I walked in the rain the night I emptied my house, which I shared with my husband, clutching the last bags, glad of the rain on my face masking my tears. My sister driving a fully loaded car next to me urging me to get in. The rain was cleansing really, but still it took years. But it did go away finally, that crippling pain! That hollow feeling!

Sometimes I wonder if I had a picture like the picture of Dorian Gray, would all this be marked on there? Would there be little sores for each trauma, each fight, each death, never to vanish completely? Is that in me somewhere now? If so, I must be knotted inside with all these wounds. So why dont I feel them every day? Maybe its so gradual, that we learn to live with them and dont notice the difference. They just become a part of us.

So when something happens now, a roadblock, a sad day, a disillusioning event I think to myself I have gotten over so much worse. I can handle this too. Sometimes it feels like life is one blow after another with minute glimpses of happiness in between. Why cant it feel like the reverse? Maybe its my black mood. Maybe its that I have been home for 58 hours. Maybe its because so many people who I love are so far away. Or maybe its the thought that I may have to face those blows alone.