Loss will affect us all eventually, no matter how much we hope it won’t. And when it happens, it’s easy to get caught thinking that the pain is never going to go away. Whilst this is a valid reaction to the weight of grief, from my experience and research of specialists, with time, it gets easier to hold. We simply get better at accepting it as part of our everyday lives.
What Loss Felt Like to me
When I was 17, I lost a friend to suicide. Up until that point, I never knew what grief felt like. When I heard the news, it was like all of the air had been squeezed out of my body. I never knew that emotional pain could physically hurt. Grief causes ‘dramatic changes in brain structure, neurotransmitter activity, and neural connectivity’. This explains why it can trigger memory loss, physical and mental exhaustion and emotional instability, just to name a few. I remember crying so much I gave myself headaches, and I couldn’t sleep or eat for weeks. I felt as though my life, along with the lives of my friends and those affected, had stopped. We were inside a bubble that wouldn’t pop.
Translating this pain was almost impossible. I remember feeling mad at those who existed outside of that isolating bubble. Of those people who carried on with their lives, I thought, how dare you go on as if nothing’s happened? This, I realise now, was a completely valid projection of the hurt and pain I was feeling. I wasn’t really mad at them; I was mad that I had to carry this weight that I definitely wasn’t ready for. It altered my life indefinitely.
I lost another friend the same way at 27. Ten years apart, and it felt just as shocking; again, I had been punched, and all of the air in my body had been squeezed out. It made me think about the way in which we hold grief and how we always manage to carry on.
Emotional Homeostasis
So why does grief feel like it will last forever? The thing about grief is that it is much more than just an emotion; it’s a state. And this state contains within it almost every emotion there is, and is all-encompassing (note the five stages of grief above). Losing someone important to you alters your life forever. As humans, our bodies are built to find homeostasis: ‘a stable internal environment, regardless of external changes.’ Thinking about this when it comes to grief helped me understand the constantly changing face of my pain that truly felt like a roller-coaster to process.
At first, my grief felt like pain that would never stop. I felt inescapably sad, shocked, traumatised, and these emotions felt magnified because we also had to process the shocking way in which the death had come about. It was an empathetic pain that the others and I affected by this had to endure; the taking on of our deceased friend’s pain. The survival instinct within my body that causes it to fight for equilibrium (homeostasis) was working overtime; I found that in between crying fits, my mind and body would suddenly feel completely numb, and I would feel okay again. Obviously, this was my body’s way of finding that stable internal environment. Our bodies can only hold so much sadness before something inside us switches it off.
A State of Numbness
Grief doesn’t always look the same. With 86% of people over the age of 16 in the UK and the US having experience with grief, it’s expected that grief can manifest in different ways. Some people face depression, delayed bereavement, manic episodes or anger, and others report a state of numbness, like denial or disbelief, according to Mind. They report that suicide carries with it other heavy emotions, such as shame or guilt, making it especially complicated for your brain to process. There is no right or wrong way to deal with pain. When I lost my friend at 17, I became self-destructive with drugs and alcohol, and missed his funeral because of this. That is something I always regretted, but with time, I began to forgive myself. I understand now that I was a child who was processing something profoundly out of my limit. My way of finding equilibrium was to escape the pain with substances.
The Hardest Process
When I experienced my friend’s death at 17, I had never lost anyone before, and so I had nothing to compare it to. I truly did feel like I was going to feel like that forever. Shelby Forsythia (a decade-long grief coach, podcaster and author) says that ‘this is not an inappropriate assumption to make.’ From her research with clients, she has found that grievers apply logic that since the loss of their loved one is permanent, so is the suffering that goes along with it. She calls this ‘plausible permanence’. The initial stages of grief make it nearly impossible to imagine a time when you won’t feel as deeply heartbroken as this, and whilst that pain will inevitably be with you forever, Shelby has found that ‘the intensity and severity of it will change over time.’
‘”Plausible Permanence”– the idea that because the loss is permanent (such as a death, divorce, or diagnosis), the effects and emotions of the loss will be permanent too. It’s a very logical conclusion for grievers to draw’, says Shelby Forsythia.
Losing my friend more recently, I found that I didn’t run away from the pain like I had done previously. And still I was riding that roller-coaster of denial, anger and bargaining. This grief felt similar to before because I was once again brutally reminded of the fragility of existence. Being around others who also carried this loss meant that we could understand the whiplash of emotions as they came. We could spend hours talking about our lost friend, followed by hours of not talking about them. We found peace in knowing we didn’t always know what to say. Ultimately, nothing we did say or any way we did act could reverse the situation anyway.
Lack of Closure
This sort of community is what helps grief feel less scary. There is no time limit on pain, no matter how much society expects us to just be ‘over it’. Dealing with grief teaches us a lot about how we accept closure. Part of grief is learning to be okay with questions and conversations not having a definitive end. Existing around people also grieving means that we can share not only heartbreak but the joy of our loved one too. There are boxes of my friends’ things waiting to be divided between the people who knew and loved them. I already carry a deck of tarot that they used to use around in my bag. I see grief the same. The pain and sadness that my loved one felt didn’t go with them when they died; it remained here on earth just like their belongings, waiting to be divided between us. We will carry their sadness and pain with us for the rest of our lives. But this also means that their joy and love didn’t go with them either; it remained here on earth to be carried on for the rest of our lives, too.
Always Here
This is how I understand grief now. The pain we feel from losing someone never goes away; we just learn to live with it. And there will be moments where that heartbreak bubbles to the surface and erupts all over again, plunging you straight back into darkness. But slowly these moments will become fewer and fewer, and the eruptions feel less apocalyptic. In this place of acceptance, I experience more glimmers of love than I do dark clouds of sadness, especially when it comes to the friend I lost at 17. This is because I see my friends in different ways now, like in the rays of sunlight as it sets over the horizon, or in the music that reminds me of them, and in my other friends’ laughter. I feel and see and hear them everywhere I go. In that I know that they are never truly lost, just transformed into something new. They have taught me practically everything I know about life and love, and I will be grateful for them forever. Grief shows us our humanity and reminds us that our loved ones are never too far away.
