“Grief has many faces,” my dad once told me. And true it is, indeed.
One moment, you’re going along, just fine. The next, it hits you like a ton of bricks. Your heart aches, it physically hurts and you feel like life is so cruel that it would go on, business as usual.
These past few weeks, I’ve grappled with a slew of emotions and thoughts…
J served as the best kind of distraction, a trip to Busan was necessary for my soul but returning to the “real world” felt daunting. The quiet, the stillness of my life here in Pyeongtaek, usually such a blessing, felt like a curse, a prison of my own thoughts and feelings.
How do you even begin grieving losing someone? How am I supposed to process the many feelings that accompany grief: anger, guilt, sorrow, hopelessness, fear. Why didn’t I tell him how much he meant to me, that he was like a brother? How do you come to terms with the fact that “Life goes on”? How do you embrace life in the midst of loss?
I’ve felt so conflicted to keep going, to stay strong, to remain present and to live on in remembrance of him but feeling so raw, so broken. When the pain begins flooding my heart, I want it to go away but I cling to it, not wanting my memories of him to go with it.
I don’t have the answers.
I won’t ever have the answers.
And maybe that’s just it. So I cling to the Cross, to the One who knows infinitely more the weight of death, the value of life, to the Friend who knows our pain, our hurt, our brokenness and embraces us as we are.
