ABSINRAW

Do you have an acquaintance who has been present at most of the significant downs in your life? Someone with whom you have never exchanged much beyond cordial greetings, yet you have always felt their presence around the moments that knocked the wind out of your body. You have wondered if there might be an association between the two, but never stepped forward to connect the dots—never thought of knowing a bit more about them.

Until one day, when you find them standing at your door unannounced, and your heart begins to sink into a quagmire of unknowns. So you decide to invite them in, hoping that knowing them better might put your heart at ease; that perhaps it will help you be ready for whatever lies on the other side of your anticipation.

Grief has been that acquaintance in my life.

It is only recently that I have been able to sit with it, to dwell within it, and try to understand it—not through the lens of what it accompanied, but on its own. In doing so, it felt as though I met a side of myself that I had parted ways with a long time ago; an identity I had shed because it carried deep scars.

I realized that grief had always stood beside me, but I had learned to ignore its presence, to alienate it, and to treat it merely as an acquaintance.

As we sat together over a quiet cup of coffee, it offered me a glimpse into the reflections it had gathered along the path I had been pushing through, seemingly unfazed. Perhaps because I finally allowed myself to acknowledge grief as a part of me, those reflections pierced deep into my soul. They were evidence of emotions I had skipped over, emotions grief had held on my behalf—accumulated and hardened over time.

I wondered whether anyone truly knows how to move forward while carrying the blame of having robbed themselves of the ability to feel loss at its full depth.

It was not only loss that I had lost. Hurt, hopelessness, failure, and absence had all been woven together with the thread of numbness.

I had understood grief only through anger—anger placed upon variables that could never be tamed—allowing it to dissipate into a kind of understanding that seemed to close the loop. It made me feel mature, but only at the cost of feeding myself a partial truth; at the cost of not being whole.

As the rest of me stared back, the seething pain of everything I had once shrugged under the carpet of numbness coursed through my existence. Accepting it gave me the strength to let go of all that I had been holding under the influence of that numbness.

Now I understand grief.

Not as an acquaintance, but as a companion.

It helps me look at my past with kindness, and my present with gratitude.