What does grief look like?

I have just been reflecting on grief and loss.  Sometimes I feel like I've had more than my fair share of loss this last eighteen months, and at other times, I'm surprised by how 'well' I seem to be coping.

Grief is a unique emotion that nobody can describe until you feel it.  And even then, how you experience it is as different as you are from the next person.

To begin with, I did surprise myself with how well I was coping.  But grief is sneaky, and I sometimes feel it...sitting there...just behind my heart..waiting for the moment to pounce.

This makes it seem like grief is an unwelcome visitor, but its not really.  I understand I must embrace it and work with it.  Sometimes we wrestle, sometimes we sit and chat.

Sometimes it is vivid memories of good times.  Sometimes it is trying to grasp what my brother must have been feeling when he found Mum.  Sometimes it is a smell or image that opens up the door to my heart and lets grief in. But Mums things all around me give me comfort. I think about my children, and how two of them will have no memories of her.  That is when I start to wonder why... why would you leave them?  But I am not angry, as I know enough to know why she did leave.  I am coming over the crest of a hill, and looking down onto the landscape of my older boy's passage into teenagehood in the not too distant future - how can I face that without her to go to for guidance?

Sometimes grief is a knawing emptiness.  Sometimes its a bottomless sadness.  I am struggling with anxiety and a lack of motivation, and I attribute that to this process.

But most of the time its just trying to understand the world without Mum and Dad - but especially, Mum - in it.  Its not easy.  Mum has always been there.  She was my rock, my safe place.  Her home - which was my home - was a haven of warm tea and idle chat about the garden or the kids.  As a friend once said, 'you're never too old to be an orphan.'  Where can I go to now for that safe haven?

The world has been rearranged.  I will not be the same person ever again.  One thing is sure.  Grief is not an event.  Its not even a feeling.  It is a journey.