Grieving vs missing

My aunt lost her husband last year. This post is for her.

Grieving someone means that you go through the five stages of grief, in no particular order, and any number of times for each stage. These stages include:

• Denial
• Anger
• Bargaining
• Depression
• Accptance

Now, these stages can take turns – it’s not at all a linear progression. You can be in the depression stage, and go right back to denial. Or be comfortable in the bargaining stage, jump to acceptance, and go right back anger. Sometimes, you can be in multiple stages in a single moment. It is a process, and it fucking sucks. Everyone’s timeline is different, everyone’s process is different, and there is nothing at all wrong with how anyone grieves. Unless of course, we’re talking about thoughts of mass murder, or ritualistic sacrifice of pets…..that may require a therapist or even a hiatus in a mental ward. But, I digress.

Grief is an emotional process with identifiable stages. It may be a process that never truly ends, but it is something that can heal to an extent. A teacher of mine in high school told me after my father passed that the hole in my chest would never heal completely, but it would close a bit with time.

Missing someone is related, but completely different. There are no stages – you feel the impact of that person’s absence in so many ways. You crave their presence, their smile, their voice, their mannerisms, their idiosyncrasies. You miss literally everything about them. You think you hear or see them in daily life even though you know they are gone. You are flat out sad and empty without them. There is no healing when it comes to missing someone. It simply becomes a part of your existence, a permanent ache in your soul.

But the thing to remember is that this person loved you, and they want you to live life to the fullest, even without them. They will see you on the other side, and will want to hear all about your adventures after they had to leave.

So. with that in mind – and I say this to myself, my aunt, and anyone else who is missing and or grieving for someone – go forth, be adventurous, do your thing – have something interesting to talk about when you see that loved one again, not just how you spent the rest of your life sad because they had things to do elsewhere.