this week’s Thought (singular)
some days are fruit days and some days are chocolate days. i won’t elaborate.
a very warm welcome to all new readers. i love new readers so much that whenever i get an email about a new reader, i manifest that they get around to finishing the book they’ve been meaning to finish. thank you for joining us. may you find a solid chunk of time to escape into the pages of whatever you’ve been struggling to muster up interest in.
hi
the following is a list of observations, thoughts, abstract ideas that i experienced or landed upon or realised while processing my grandfather’s passing two months ago. if there’s one thing i’ve learnt, it’s that there does exist a single thread of commonality between all grief, and that’s the importance of community, so please feel free to share your own thoughts. thank you, may you heal.
this scene from wandavision –
grief is odd, because you don’t usually pay attention to the absence of something – presence is what stands out. grief is odd, because you essentially have to look at the place which was once full and is now empty. grief is odd, because you desperately search for the something where there is suddenly a nothing, and what you’re left surveying instead is a blank space. how do you feel an emptiness? how can a nothing be such a painful something?
this scene from fleabag –
the five stages of grief are constantly fluctuating. they do not come in order. they overlap and undercut each other, and sometimes they happen simultaneously. they eventually settle into a routine. some days you can laugh about it, remembering something silly that they did. some days you cry, when you’re especially tired and that emptiness threatens to engulf you whole. some days you don’t remember and feel horrible for it.
the first line of this song by hayley williams – ‘there’s no such thing as good grief’
grief is not just mourning. or rather, mourning does not always look the same. mourning can be honouring their memory by going to their favourite restaurant alone and ordering their regular dish and suddenly not being so alone anymore. mourning can be forgetting that you’ve only got to put tea for one now and having an extra steaming cup and standing unblinking in the middle of the kitchen as their absence sinks in again and again and again. mourning can be the family gathering around the table for dinner and realising that the chair that they’ve gotten so used to seeing full is now free. it can be discussing their life and death with relatives, their goods and bads. and it can be acknowledging the differences in the house, the sudden calmness and lifted weight, the quietness in the mornings, the lack of necessity to always be on guard in case the unthinkable should happen, since the unthinkable has already happened.
these scenes from succession –
grief doesn’t ever fully leave. the hole just shrinks little by little, until there’s room for other things again. the hole always stays, but your capacity to expand around it increases.
these lines from no more grandma poems by yolanda wisher –
every poem is your grandma & you miss her wouldn’t mind seeing her again even just for a momentif grief is a weight that must be dragged along, friends and family are the rope helping you haul the damn thing over your shoulder, armed with knives to start chopping when you say so. if grief is a boulder to be carried above your head, friends and family are the million balloons tied to the top, keeping it from crushing you until you’re ready to lower it. if grief is an ocean that you’re gasping, sinking, doggy-paddling, mindlessly floating in, friends and family are the life-jackets, seeing that you don’t go under.
this quote by andrew garfield after his mother’s passing in 2021 –
these lines from How We Take Our Grief by Kimberly Grey –
We hold our grief out in front of us. We think this is private. We take our grief and pour it in a glass. We think we have mouths we think we have arms to hold it.
A Picture!
thank you for reading, and see you next week <3
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A wonderful post :)