The loneliness of Grief
Grief is a strange experience, no amount of googling (you’ll hear me say this a lot!) will give you the exact answer you are looking for, grief is experience based and individual to each situation, and yet we experience it as a collective. The grief I currently feel is so different from the grief I experienced 11 years ago when my Dad passed away, and yet there are so many similarities. If you think about it too much it’ll do your head in.
For the first time in my grief I finally have the ability to describe the loneliness of grief, this current form of loneliness anyway, grief is expansive and so is loneliness, those two things crashing together are reminiscent to me of the Pacific ocean and Tasman sea meeting at Te Rerenga Wairua. This loneliness has no remedy to it, it just exists as something I have to learn to live with, no amount of spending time with others, spending time with myself, picking up hobbies or doing the things is going to soothe this loneliness. This loneliness will only be remedied by spending time with the person who has passed away, and that is not a reality I can access.
It is a loneliness that is persistent, and I often find myself searching through the recesses of my mind to find the answer to my loneliness, or becoming easily frustrated by the loneliness, moments of “but I’m with (insert person’s name), why am I feeling so lonely right now,” and then as if I am having the thought for the very first time, every single time, I remember that my loneliness is the missing of my beautiful Māmā and that no other person will ever fill this gap. That then begins another cycle of searching, as if searching through a basket with no bottom I try to find the thing that’ll make me feel close to her, is it this song, or this memory, is it this book, or this photo? In an attempt to ease the pain of my loneliness I pull everything out of the basket, I dump as much of it’s contents onto the floor of my mind, and whilst momentarily I feel the loneliness subside, the task proves to be fruitless. Once I have pulled everything out, and endure the slow task of putting it all back in again, I am left once more with the feeling of loneliness that cannot be soothed. I sit with my missing of her, I hold onto the photo, the t-shirt, the songs on repeat, but what I know now is that I will always live with this loneliness and at some point along the way I know that I won’t need to pull everything out of the basket, I won’t need to google “grief and loneliness,” as my journey (and yours) with grief continues I know that I will make peace with this lonely part, it will remind me of how I loved her and the love she had for me. I know, in time that will all come, but for now I will continue to google, and search, and hope to remedy my loneliness until the discomfort of it eases.
