With the holidays comes the temptation to rehearse patterns of grief as we revist loss in all it’s various forms.
““If someone or something [we lost] meant that much to us, we should want to hold on, to preserve it, to savor what little is left behind... [but] I have made the active decision to give myself the permission to be happy instead.””
I can pretty much bet that no one has escaped a sense of grief in the last three years. And not even just in relation to the collective sense of grief that came with experiencing a global pandemic.
One of the hardest things about hitting your late twenties onward is that life just seems to get really real all of a sudden. It’s almost like a switch flips with no warning and suddenly you’re plunged head-first into a world that always existed, but you were somehow shielded from. You start to grow apart from people who you once considered friends. You realize your parents aren’t the perfect people you once thought they were. Loved ones pass away, and others make the choice to leave. You become a mother and lose a part of who you once were, or you lose a job and the place you once found a distinct sense of value. Shit just starts to happen that you were not prepared for and suddenly life starts to feel very uncomfortable and… unmanageable.
I have become well acquainted with grief in all its forms. My mother was diagnosed with stage one uterine cancer in March of 2019. By the time October came around, the cancer had advanced to stage three despite several rounds of radiation, and chemotherapy began. The week before my 30th birthday, I sat in an office with my father and listened as the doctor told us she was terminal and only had a few months to live. I actually remember spending my birthday in the mall shopping from the Christmas list she had made, knowing she only had a few weeks left to wear any of these things. Then I spent the next six weeks in and out of the hospital watching her deteriorate until she finally passed on.
A few weeks later we went into lockdown and I was stuck in a new apartment, in a new country, by myself, unable to process this new grief. I was unable to be with family, or friends, and I would eventually miss my own mother’s funeral.
I have suffered a lot more loss and grief in the years since. Two grandmothers. Friendships. Relationships. I have also watched the people I love mourn and grieve over their own losses in a myriad of ways. You might say now at 33 I have become well-acquainted with grief - a familiarity I neither wished nor asked for. But that is the thing with age, isn’t it? The experience they tell us we will gain with age is not always good. Much of that experience will be deeply painful and lonely and isolating. And while I think a part of us always knew that, I don’t think any of us could ever conceptualize all the many ways loss would show up at our door steps and leave us broken - perhaps even shattered.
My grief for the loss of my mother started before she actually passed, and in the three years since, I have learned that grief truly does come in waves. I’ve also learned that many of us - myself included - often feel this need to perform grief. We feel guilty for the moments where we are happy, when we are not as distraught by loss as we think we should be. We feel a hesitancy to move on, because we feel like we should still be in a period of mourning. If someone or something meant that much to us, we should want to hold on, to preserve it, to savor what little is left behind. We suspect that maybe it is our happiness that is performative, that we are deceiving ourselves. Or at the very least that others think we are trying to deceive them into thinking we are happy, when we should be - by all societal measures - miserable.
It is because I know now just how fickle grief can be, showing up at any moment without warning, that I have learned not to perform it. I do not prepare to be sad. I do not waste time preempting hard seasons or expecting tears on significant occasions or periods of loss. While I am always tempted to enter a period of mourning when a relationship has ended or an opportunity has evaporated before my eyes, I have made the active decision to give myself the permission to be happy instead.
I had the most amazing day on my mother’s birthday this year. Part of me was tempted to take the day off and stay in bed, but instead I gave myself the permission to feel whatever I would feel that day, and it was a lovely day. I have had several days since - completely random moments - that I have found myself grieving my mother out of the blue. So I am so happy for the moments when I gave myself permission to be happy when by all measures I believed I should have been sad.
I don’t know what you’ve lost in your life recently. I’ve had far too many difficult conversations of late to believe every single one of us isn’t torn up inside about one thing or the other. But if you were looking for permission to allow yourself to be happy in spite of it, please allow me to give you mine. This life is far too short - and at the same time far too long - to put on a display of grief where there is none in the moment. We will have enough grief to last us for a lifetime, so do not be sad when you don’t actually feel sad. And if you do that, you also in the same vein give yourself permission not to feign happiness when you don’t have it in you.
You have my permission to move as fluidly through your emotions as you hope to in your world.