"According to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, when we're dying or have suffered a catastrophic loss, we all move through five distinct stages of grief. We go into denial because the loss is so unthinkable we can’t imagine it’s true. We become angry with everyone, angry with survivors, angry with ourselves. Then we bargain. We beg. We plead. We offer everything we have, we offer our souls in exchange for just one more day. When the bargaining has failed and the anger is too hard to maintain, we fall into depression, despair, until finally we have to accept that we’ve done everything we can. We let go. We let go and move into acceptance."
-Grey's Anatomy, Season 6, Episode 2
***
I've been thinking a lot about the five stages of grief (the
Kübler-Ross model) lately, and how it affects both the people I know and myself. I'm in a weird place. I smile and go through the day like normal, but inside I feel like a can of carbonated emotions that has been shaken so many times it's about to pop and spray everywhere. The hardest part for me is that I feel like I shouldn't be feeling like this. I shouldn't be having a hard time letting go, I should be able to just pick myself up and move on like I usually do. It's just not happening.
***
"Grief may be a thing we all have in common, but it looks different on everyone. It isn't just death we have to grieve, it's life, it's loss, it's change."
-Grey's Anatomy, Season 6, Episode 2
I've been watching a lot of my friends go through their grieving too, and contemplating how it works for each of us. I have friends that have experienced deaths both tragic and natural within the past year, divorces that left them aching, and all around life altering change and acceptance of past events they've blocked out for too long already. They hurt, and I hurt for them as well.
I'm not very good at knowing what to do or say when they're hurting like that. I think it's mostly because I don't even know how to handle my own grief. Everyone reacts differently. Some people want to be held and around people all the time, and I just want to pretend nothing is wrong until it gets too hard and then I want to shut myself away from the world and be left to it until I'm ready to talk. Then when I need to talk, I want to process it and regurgitate everything I've been thinking out loud to someone until it actually makes sense to me.
I'm grieving, and I've been having a hard time understanding why exactly I'm grieving so hard. Why can't I just accept that he's just another asshole ex and move on instead of torturing myself with the process? I mean it's been years since we were actually in a relationship, the last few years we've just been friends.
This weekend I came to terms with why this has been so hard. Looking back, I'm pretty sure he's the only one of my exes I've ever actually loved. Which would make him my first love. Which means he's stuck being the one I never really let go of completely. Damn it. I hate him.
I hate him for using me for as long as he needed me and then just dropping me when he decided he didn't any more, for stopping being my friend so he could sleep with my friend, for pulling me into his life and getting me attached to those children of his and then just shutting me out, for trying to turn my friends against me, for saying hateful things about a mutual friend when that friend needed love most, and for being everything I never thought he was.
Mostly I hate that I know the hate will fade. I want to hang on to the anger, because angry is so much easier than sadness. I'd rather hate him than miss him, because I really don't want anything to do with him ever again. He's proven that he'll never be the person I thought he was. The hardest part for me is the kids. I miss them more than my heart can take.
I've got some healing to do, and I'm not sure where to start. I'll just keep moving forward and hoping that with a little love and support, the pain I feel will fade as I go.
***
"And when we wonder why it has to suck so much sometimes, has to hurt so bad, the thing we've got to remember is that it can turn on a dime. That's how you stay alive. When it hurts so much you can't breath, that's how you survive. By remembering that someday, somehow, impossibly, you wont feel this way. It wont hurt so much.
Grief comes in it's own time for everyone, in it's own way. So the best we can do, the best anyone can do, is try for honesty. The really crappy thing, the very worst part of grief is that you can't control it. The best we can do is try to feel it when it comes, and let it go when we can.
The very worst part is that the minute you think you're past it, it starts all over again. And always, every time, it takes your breath away."
-Grey's Anatomy, Season 6, Episode 2
