I’m currently drinking coffee on a Saturday morning in the peace of my living room. It’s so quiet. I can hear the people going about their business in the shop downstairs and every now and then a tractor goes past.

Village life is interesting! I’m nice and warm now and have been thinking about posting this after having a conversation with a friend in the same shitty club as me, earlier in the week.

I was talking about how a young coworker had asked me about how she should talk to her friend and understand how she was feeling as her dad had just died. Part of me was thinking – “how should I know? I’ve not lost my dad!” But I tried to explain how grief feels to me. It defines me now as a person, having lost not only the one man I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with, but my whole future. How can it not change a person?

To me grief is like being given a rucksack full of rocks out of the blue. And being told to wear it all the time. At first it’s so heavy you can’t think about anything else. You can’t eat, you certainly can’t sleep and you’re so tired all the time from carrying it. All you can think about is the weight of the rocks and how it hurts your chest to carry them. It pulls you down and you can’t focus on anything else.

Everyone else notices of course and offers to help you carry the rocks. You can’t hand them over of course! They’re your rocks and only yours to carry. But the fact people are offering is great. It makes you feel stronger. Some friends may lend a hand and grab the straps and help take the weight for a while, but you just can’t take off that bag and dump it!

As time goes on, you learn the best ways to live whilst wearing the bag. Maybe you find a new way of getting to sleep, or you find a way to ignore them for a bit, maybe yoga, or writing or whatever you can, because it’s nice to feel the weight dissipate for a bit. People of course, see you managing to carry that bag and not bent over with the weight of it and don’t really offer to help carry it. If you’re lucky enough, you may find yourself meeting other people with rucksacks of their own. They, of course, will offer to grab the straps to ease the weight, because they bloody well know how heavy it can be sometimes! You do the same for them too and that makes you feel stronger in turn.

Soon you’re used to your rucksack. You might adjust the straps or decorate it somehow with decorations you’d not have chosen before. Maybe a new hobby or just memories stitched into the bag that make it easier to carry. You always know it’s there because you feel the weight of it pulling in you chest. It’s always there, but that’s ok. You don’t even want to take it off because the rocks are all that’s left of such a wonderful part of your life. Maybe you look inside the backpack and find some of the rocks are actually lumps of rose quartz, or gold, or for geology nuts like me- some gneiss!

Of course sometimes you might wake up and not have the strength to carry the rucksack. Or maybe a memory or event or person will add a rock, it could be a pretty crystal or a lump of coal, but you take up the strain.

You might feel the enormity of it and it all feels like you’ve just been given the bag again. And that’s ok. You’re not superhuman. As time passes, as it is wont to do, those that care and those with bags of their own will help. And you know that you’ll be able to carry it again soon. Maybe you decide you don’t need some of the lumps of coal (the “what if” lumps, or the shitty people lumps) so you burn them. The bag is lighter and the rocks left are prettier and worth carrying.

But you never ever want to take it off, because those rocks are special and they are yours. And that my dears, is what it is like for me. Everyone’s grief is different. If I can help you take the strain on your bag it would be by saying

Get support from wherever you can.

Try and make room for the crystals and gold by chucking out the coal. You do you- screw those shitty family members!

And look out for other people carrying bags of rocks if your strong enough to take the strain when they need it, they’ll do you a solid and help you out too.

Love you all x

Widowed and Young

The Good Grief Trust

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