Let Me Grieve While Returning Home

Do you know that moment when it hurts so much inside you that you can’t cry? Instead, you start screaming, howling, and cursing in a silly hope that the suffering will finally end. But it doesn’t, and nothing can take you out of the dark. You think about final solutions, the only ways to stop the pain. And then you realize that way will bring more pain and suffering to the ones you love and hopelessly start yelling again, fighting with God, fighting with life in despair. Yet, the heart is still broken, and nothing can fix it. Nobody and nothing can bring back your loved one. You imagine that somebody put a spell on you, jealous of your happiness. You make scenarios full of “what ifs”. And all you need is a little break away from anything and everything, together alone with your grief.

But you can’t do that, surrounded by benevolent friends and family members that show up with unwanted advice.

It’s not socially acceptable to grieve. Feeling lost and desperate after losing someone are seen as signs of weakness.

“You should get over it,” people say, in a futile attempt to help you get better.” You should be strong, don’t think about it!” others tell you, trying to comfort you. Still, they can’t.

Nobody knows what you are thinking and feeling. Even if you share the pain with other family members, each feels differently, and it’s hard to understand the one that feels the pain more intensely. In society’s eyes, pain should not be expressed after the burial or incineration of the dead. We are not even allowed to grieve for as long as we need. When losing a parent, the employer allows a vacation for five days, not more, and expects the employee to return to the office earlier than the term mentioned above.

The griever has a stigma on him, as if the death put a mark on his forehead. And the good wishes are whispered in a strange rush. People are so afraid of showing a shade of vulnerability that they prefer politeness to kindness.

Society accepts that we hurt, but that feeling should be reduced to a bare minimum. We should continue living as before. We can’t fit our pain into specific numbers and rules. We can’t put our desolation and despair in a box and bury them with the deceased. We know that we still live, and we know that we should go on, but it’s so God damn hard.

And we don’t want anybody to cheer us up. This is not what helps us. We need to be allowed to grieve as long as we need. We need to be allowed to feel.

If you open your heart and let somebody in, you love the person or that pet, and you can’t pretend that everything is fine. You still love that someone after passing on the other side. Love can’t stop just because you are in different worlds. Love continues to exist, and loving a ghost is insanely heartbreaking. True love makes us vulnerable. The loss of it devastates us.

We can find small gestures of comfort, but we will never be the same. So let us grieve. Our love will never come home again. All we can do is to speak with the shadows and pretend we found our beloved ghost.

And maybe, just maybe, the sound we hear on the darkest night is a sign of love. And hope. And a crazy lover that silently holds us tight.