If It Keeps You Here

Keep talking

Sometimes I get self conscious about writing about this process. This process of being born into someone else. Grieving my old life, my husband, my old self, my foster son, my mother-in-law, and a friend, all within the span of a year.

Most days, I barely know which direction to grieve in.

Then I sit down to write. I want to write about life, about music, about the good things happening too. But the things that seem to need processing the most are always this. This process.

I saw a video the other day by a creator saying she felt self conscious talking to her friends about her grief all the time. She said she admitted this to a stranger at a bar, and he responded:

“If it keeps you here, keep talking.”

That line stayed with me.

It’s been twenty months. But really, it’s been twenty-nine months since everything took its turn. Since the tsunami started gathering speed far out in the ocean, slowly making its way toward me. Some days, or weeks, it still knocks me under.

Last week it did.

The sorrow felt bottomless. I genuinely thought, at points, I might not make it through another day of feeling it. But the waves come in, and the waves go out.

The trick is keeping your face pointed toward the sky long enough to breathe.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about the secondary losses that happen when grief fundamentally changes you. The friendships that quietly disappear.

For a long time, I’ve been heartbroken over the people who drifted away after Jeremy died. I felt abandoned. Forgotten. Isolated. Like I had somehow become contagious. Like grief gave me emotional cooties nobody wanted to catch.

But recently, I realized something. I don’t blame them. Really, I don’t.

The truth is, I am not the friendship they originally signed up for. Whatever version of me they met years ago has changed.

Sure, at my core I’d like to think I’m still the loving, hilarious, charming, generous, creative friend I’ve always been. (Please note the immense physical difficulty it took for me to type that sentence.)

But there is an undertow of sadness in me now that I can’t shake. Maybe one day it won’t be as loud. But right now, I am still very much inside it.

I laugh. I make jokes. I keep moving forward in many areas of my life. But the melancholy is there. I have weight to me now. I have lived a lot of life in a very short amount of time. I have seen some of the darker shades of being human. And maybe that just isn’t for everyone.

And honestly, that’s okay.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it hurts. There are people I miss deeply. People who confused me. People I thought would stay. But I understand it too.

I don’t necessarily relate to it, but I understand it.

And here’s the thing: I can’t change any of it. I can work toward acceptance. I can try to stay present. But I cannot change the past, or where it has taken me, or who it has made me.

I would give anything to undo it all, bring back my people, including myself. But here we are.

So I will keep writing about it. Talking about it. Singing about it. About what it means to survive all of that. Because some of us need to know we are not alone in it.

And some days, that is what keeps me here.