Miscellaneous

Grief

Writing Sparkle

A heavy blanket that adheres and demands attention. It can’t be removed. It can’t be ignored. Chameleon like, when you think it has loosed its grip, it triggers in a new form: a song on the radio, a smell, snippets of remembered conversation, a date, an event or an unexpected question… Grief’s journey is personal and unwilling to follow a schedule or expected plan.

By Shari Marshall – 2020

15 thoughts on “Grief”

      1. I meant that the degree of grief you feel has something to do with the degree of your feelings/love for the person. To clarify I have lost both my parents but my grief varied wildly between them because my Mother was an alcoholic and we had a very volatile relationship while my Dad and I were thick as thieves. I felt guilty for not feeling more grief when she passed.

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      2. I think that desensitization has a place in grief as well (at least a temporary one). Thinking about emergency response workers for example, desensitization is sometimes what allows us to respond to calls for service. I have dealt with situations that if I wasn’t able to mental/emotionally distance myself in the moment I wouldn’t have been able to provide the service required of me. For me, when my mother passed this summer I had to pause my grief to deal with her service arrangements and estate because there wasn’t anyone else to do it. What I have found important is acknowledging that desensitization and processing it as well.

        Thank you both for sharing!

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  3. Sending you love. One of the most difficult of the many difficult aspects of grief, I have found, is knowing what to do with all the love that is left over. Beautiful words. ❤

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    1. Wow, yes you are very right. That left over love can be such a powerful and crushing part of the grief. As I read you words I thought about my mother who passed in the summer and how often times I am overcome with emotion and can’t name it or why but you just did. Thank you.

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  4. One of my favorite things ever written about grief was said from one comic book character to another: “You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on.”

    Everyone grieves in their own way, at their own pace. And when you think it’s gone, it’s really just hiding- waiting for a chance to sneak up on you later when you are minding your own business completely unaware.

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  5. I’m sorry for your loss. I love the heavy blanket metaphor because that’s definitely one of it’s shape-shifting forms. How sometimes it sits on you like a comforting hug, and sometimes it just smothers, like the blanket that brings down the whole fort. Sending love. Beautiful writing.

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