Losing The Ones I Loved Taught Me To Live My Best Life And Grow In Grief

I was only 13 when my sister died, not long after her death followed my dad’s. At a young age, I understood the gravity and possibility of death – I felt the grief it leaves behind. And since then, I had known grief possibly too much to know anything else.

Grief reveals you because it allows you to grow.

What it means to grow in grief is that you’re never just thinking of what you want to do. You’re also thinking of what this person would’ve done had they been alive.

It’s like you feel the pressure to live the years they lost.

That’s why you feel the need to calculate every decision and risk. You feel it matters so much not to waste time over things that don’t and won’t matter. And even at times you just want to shut that thought process off, you can’t.

When you’re dealing with grief, it’s like you automatically go beyond the tip of the iceberg. You think twenty steps ahead.

Nothing ever feels as simple as it should. Vulnerability becomes so hard. Everything becomes so complicated in your head, and you wish it weren’t.

You wish sometimes that you could forget the grief process you were accustomed to when you would think that way, when you would try to puzzle everything in your head just for it to make sense to you.

Maybe you stop trying to understand why they died because you realized you never will.

But then you understand that their death will always make sense in the littlest things that happen to you. So maybe you lose the urge to cry yourself to sleep, or drown yourself in sorrow. And yes you do reach a point when you make peace with how it is, and the fact that you can’t change it.

But what it means to grow in grief is that even when you’re done grieving, you’re never done growing in grief.

Maybe you’ll come off as the girl that’s too serious, snobbish even, but you learn to live with how you grow.

You quit hating yourself for not being able to be just as carefree as everyone is. You learn to be carefree and free spirited in a way that works for you. You’ll always grow in the way grief taught you, because there’s no alternate growth you’re familiar with.

Growing in grief is not an excuse to miss out on things you feel don’t matter. Growing in grief means understanding that life just goes and if you think too much, you might miss it.

Growing in grief means knowing that whether something matters or not, is up to you.

Growing in grief and living with that pressure means learning to build a life around it. When you’ve grown enough, you skip to the part when you understand the value of living your life and the lost years of your loved ones, and you understand that there is growth and life in mistakes and miscalculated risks too.