Why don’t we talk openly about the gut wrecthing loss of a child? The fact is we don’t want to burden, upset or shock, yes shock, those who care enough to ask, “How are you doing?”.

I think we should talk about it. It’s uncomfortable,incredibly tragic but not really spoken about.

We barely talk about grief as it is, why not? It is sadly something we have all or will all face sooner or later.

Grief is defined in the dictionary as intense sorrow,especially caused by someones death.

There are roughly five stages of grief :
Denial,
Anger,
Bargaining,
Depression
Acceptance.

I don’t quite know where I am within these five stages.

I don’t think that these five stages explain my grief. How can you put grief into five or twelve or any amount of stages? Grief is deeply personnal. That much, I know to be true.

I suppose the idea of these stages is to try to help people through their feelings, because believe me, there are a zillion feelings and a lot of them don’t make sense.

I’ve dealt with death before. Who gets to almost 40 and hasn’t eh?

I’ve simply never encountered grief this heavy before. It is heavy. It’s alot like carrying an invisible weight that will make you drop to your knees without any warning.

My grief makes me look and sound different. It can make me overly sensitive or uninterested in the lives of those I love. It can make me care too much or simply stop me from caring at all.

It’s hard to be around people and talk everyday drivel. In one way, I’m thankful for the lockdown because I can’t see people. In another way I miss people and talking- grief literally has my head in a spin and I can’t even narrate what it’s done to my heart.

My grief has made me fearless at times – I bought a car and decided this time I am finishing my lessons and passing the test. I am currently doing that. I’ve had an anxiety / fear about driving for years, I let that anxiety stop me halfway through driving lessons a few years ago. Now though, I have a strong urge to learn to drive that damn car.

Yet, my grief has made me fear things that I cannot control or change – what if something else happens to those I love? What if I didn’t do enough for Ethan? What if I made the wrong decisions on the 23rd of September? What if something happens to my other boys or my other siblings or my parents or Ds parents…Jesus, what if something happens to the only person in the world who feels what I feel, what if something happens to D? ..and so the fear and anxiety snowball from there ..Yet, I can get behind the wheel of my mini (awfully cute car, fyi) and know that I will be safe.

My grief confuses me. It strangles me, yet it can free me: the worst has already happened to me and my family.

I still don’t know much about grief or about five or tweleve stages but what I do know is that grief will forever be part of my life.

I need to let it have as much space as it requires in order to help the weight of it.

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