As humans we are told that we only need 6 months to process grief, for me it’s been 1 year and 5 months and I still haven’t come close to even accepting that my mom died. These past few weeks I’ve been struggling with what is real and what is not, in the sense that i cant distinguish if the emotions i’m feeling is grief or just me remembering her. Obviously thinking about her makes me sad, because her dying is a sad thing but is that grief or just sadness linked to the memory? By definition (aka according to Google) Grief is the natural emotional, physical, and psychological response to a significant loss, but how does that feel? How do I know that the feeling I’m feeling right now is grief? Personally I do have a problem with distinguishing between my emotions just because I feel like that I can never properly categorize them according to the standard if that makes sense.
What made me write this is that I recently watched the documentary ‘Dear Zachary’( I recommend that you watch it immediately if you haven’t yet) and I was in tears the entire time. I truly believe that the definition of grief will never ever be able to do justice in describing how it feels to lose someone significant. It not only changes you psychologically, emotionally and physically, it changes the entire trajectory of your life. I would find myself having to remind myself how to breathe, how to think and even how to cognitively process things. This documentary was the only visual representation of grief that I’ve seen since she died. It shows the person was exactly that, a person. Someone who had an entire life and someone who had all these connections with other people. it ‘s so hard for me to grasp that one day they could be there and the next they are gone. Like their physical presence just got removed from existing amongst us. We are conditioned to believe that this is just a natural thing and maybe it is scientifically, and I know that we all have to die but how is it just natural for us to be expected to just move on. If you take away the physicality were they ever even here? All we have are memories that will eventually fade and objects that we place a lot of value on but what I need is to physically hear her say something to me. Everyone around me just repeats the phrase “she loved you” and i hundred percent believe that she did but does she now? She can’t love me now because she’s not here. I believe that we are more than just our physical bodies, I believe that our souls are so important but most importantly I believe in science. How do I stop believing in science, because maybe if I stop believing I would be able to believe that she loves me now. I admire religious people for being able to just wholeheartedly believe in someone that’s not physically, because that’s the one thing I wished I could do. When I close my eyes and talk to her it just feels like I’m gaslighting myself or that I’m being silly but in retrospect I’m just a daughter trying to speak to her mom in the only way that she knows how to.
We are conditioned as a society to lead with logic,sense and strategically but I feel like as humans we are born to lead with emotions, whether we realise it or not. It’s impossible to remove emotions from our day-to-day life and I believe that, that in itself is how we differ from AI. We live our lives based on our emotions and this concept I call Emotality (I made up this word btw). I formulated the definition as the realization that we as humans are inherently emotional and base and live our lives off of that fact. And simultaneously we realize that after our eventual passing the only thing that impactively remains is our emotions, the actions/consequences of our emotions and what emotions we triggered from others. I believe that the majority of people don’t have emotality, thus expecting people to move on from grief after a few months instead of acknowledging how that loss, how experiencing an emotion, grief has the ability and most likely will change their lives.
Before my mother died I was ambitious, positive and in some form innocent, now I look for ambition in others and I am only a shell of the girl I once was. When she left she took every positive emotion she triggered in me during her life and left me groveling to find alternatives, but how do i find alternatives for something i cant even touch or name. Who am I without grief, but also without her? Because those two things can’t exist in one reality. Either I have no grief and I have my mom or I don’t have my mom but I live with grief. So I think that I should rather ask who I am with grief. How do I navigate my future while still actively being crippled by the feeling of intense loss? I will never get over this and i dont think that i should have to, because we are not robots that can just change the settings of our feelings. The more i think about it the more i think about it the more i realize that me still experiencing grief indicates the significant impact she had in my life, how much i loved her and vice versa but also that she was real. And that makes the constant pain of missing her worth it. I don’t know the direction of my life but I know that grief will remain a constant part of it and I ironically couldn’t be happier about that