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An Excerpt from the Grief Diaries
An analogy to try to make sense of loss.
If you have ever lost a loved one, you know all too well that it can become an anxiety-inducing situation.
I lost my father three weeks before my twentieth birthday, a week before the second-semester finals of my sophomore year in college. Now that I have lived long enough to survive more years on earth without my dad than with him, my perspective has evolved.
I recently chatted with a close friend who lost his dad three years ago. He wondered if the ache ever dulled or subsided.
Though I have spent some much time processing the loss of my father, I sat silent for a moment, jerry-rigging together a potential answer to his question.
Well, I am now of the belief that one ever definitively moves past loss. Or, at least in my life, I cannot fully move past loss.
Grief hunkers down and makes a home within me like a squatter.
Whenever I try kicking it out, it surely returns and is more likely to vandalize or torch the whole place.
If I ignore the fact I don’t want grief inside me yet choose to be kind towards it, it treats me well in return.
That means each time grief illegally sets up shop in my thoughts, I need to invent new tools and author new…