Week 24. Goodbyes

At times life brings people to our lives, and sometimes takes them away. By choice or regardless of what we think about it. Either way, there’s no other way but to accept the new reality, because the tighter we hold onto what has to go, the more painfully it gets ripped out of our arms.

In recent years and months this truth rang between my ribs many times. In some instances in waves, in others, in clusters, almost with no time to breath in between shock waves, with no pauses to collect the shattered pieces. In almost all forms I had to say goodbye to so many things I lost count. What I’ve learned from that is no matter how big or small the goodbye was, almost always comes a period of grief. Grief of what was and is no longer, what we deserve but never got, grieving the potential of what could have been, of the “ifs” and alternative paths never taken, of the future now we will never have with this thing, career path or a person. Another thing that I’ve learned is that grief is not linear. I have heard it before but it hits differently when you experience it viscerally. There are days filled with joy that the life if so much different now than before and the change was necessary, others when we miss that thing incredibly strongly but still are glad it’s not in our lives anymore, days when we rationalize and convince ourselves that the decision was best for everyone, and days when we ball our eyes out into the pillow / in the car / in the shower, laying on the floor in the middle of the night (at times choosing one of these options, sometimes all above, in a row). Confusing thing is that this does not happen in stages, in a structural, logical way but completely irrationally scrambled and jumbled. It gets so confusing that we usually start to wonder what is wrong with us, why are we so all over the place when we rationally know this is irreversible, there’s nothing to be done or solved but we’re still, oh so not ok with it. But dear, nothing is wrong, that’s simply how grief works. For some, it goes by faster, with rare and shallow stings, for others, it could almost feel like the life is ending, doesn’t matter if it’s losing a job, a pet, a limb of our own, having that last conversation with a loved one, seperating from a friend or any other goodbye, said to a meaningful thing for us. It’s sad, it sucks, it’s painful and it’s still worth it to start every day knowing it’s not there anymore. On one hand, it shows that we’re capable of caring, valuing, loving enough to feel the loss of it. On the other hand, each day we get to rediscover how life looks like with new set of circumstances and to be more compassionate towards ourselves, in extension, towards others too because we know how unbearable it feels and still choose to show up each day, with drying tears in our eyes and immense courage in our hearts to believe that, whatever life brings or takes from us this day, we’ll get through this.

Have a brave week.

*P. S. I’ve written this week’s Read a few weeks later since this topic hits hard and needed some time to air out. My main reason of sharing all this is hope that maybe by reading this week’s pondering you would feel less alone if you too are moving through grief and goodbyes in your life. Hope that helps.