It’s not like I don’t have triggers.
I do (maybe even more than the average person does eight plus years into their journey of grief). Just the other day I broke down in tears in the middle of a yoga class — a very public and full yoga class — and the tears just kept coming. I didn’t feel zen at all.
I still think it’s totally unfair that by the time I turned twenty, I was parent-less while there are 50-something-year-olds who don’t realize how lucky they are to have both of their parents alive. However, over the last eight years, I have accepted this unfairness and realize that no matter how much wishing I do, Mom’s gone and she isn’t coming back.
I’ve accepted that I won’t ever get to know her as well as I want to, and that she won’t get to see me as I grow into a person that she would have been really proud of. I’ve accepted that if I ever get married and/or have children, my partner won’t have in-laws and my children won’t have maternal grandparents. These realizations hit me all the time and make me very sad, but I’ve accepted that life is not fair and that this is just the way it is.
These realizations hit me all the time, but I’ve accepted that life is not fair — this is what I call owning my grief.
Saying it this way is, in my opinion, the ‘hip’ way of saying that I have entered the phase of grief called acceptance. Owning my grief means that I can work with it and find ways to live with it because it isn’t going anywhere. It doesn’t mean that I’m over it because that is never going to happen.
What it does mean though is that I’ve moved passed asking “why me?”, “why this?”, and hating everything. I know that waves of grief ebb and flow and there are good days and bad.
I know that we have to fight on the bad days and cope to make it to the good day, but I now know that there are going to be good days.
So, I’m owning my grief and owning it like a BO$$.
