30 Jan Grief is so heavy…
26th January 2025
“I know this:
there is no sense to grief. There is no pattern or shape or texture, and there are no books or stories which can lessen the pain of losing a person you have loved, and will always love. There are no rules, with loss.”
― Susan Fletcher
Maybe it’s got something to do with the January phenomenon of SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) but these last few weeks (whatever the reason) I’ve been struggling with a heaviness that could be bordering on depression.
Maybe it’s all the sadness and horrific tragedies we hear in the news every single day – wars, murders, abuse, famine…
Maybe it’s got something to do with big life uncertainties that lie ahead – to retire or not to retire? Work has been my focus – a reason to keep going. A way to fill my days with purpose. But I’m of that ripe old age when the inevitable is looming and my heart fears another empty space – a very different loss but a loss nonetheless.
Maybe it’s simply the aftermath of another Christmas without Ben. Trying to celebrate special dates without a loved one requires enormous effort and leaves you feeling ragged and worn out. One minute the house was busy – bursting with noise and laughter then suddenly it was over. The emptiness deafening and my mind went into some sort of self pitying overdrive.
But probably it’s because we’ve entered 2025 and every new year takes us further away from the one Ben was in. Maybe January just matches my mood rather than the other way round. Like it or not 2018 is slipping further and further into our past…
– Sometimes he feels close; other times I can’t feel him at all
– Sometimes I hear his voice; other times there is just silence
– Sometimes it feels like yesterday; other times a lifetime ago.
It’s actually over six years since our beautiful boy’s heart suddenly stopped beating…
75 months since our safe happy world fell apart…
329 weeks since we last spoke to him, hugged him, heard his voice…
2303 days since we started out on this agonising journey with grief.
(Just writing those numbers down makes my heart lurch – I can still hardly believe this is real)
Grief is so so heavy.
Yet I often wonder how it can be heavy when emptiness weights nothing?
“People talk about grief as emptiness, but it's not empty. It's full. Heavy.
Not an absence to fill, A weight to pull. Your skin caught on hooks chained to rough boulders made of all the futures you thought you'd have.”
– ELAN MASTAI
When I was a child all my stories had happy endings. Even as an adult I naively believed that my safe happy world was somehow invincible – that with God’s help I was strong enough to cope with whatever life might throw at us! Losing our twenty five year old son blew that out the window. The narrative changed.
Yet I also discovered that even when tragedy hits and stops us in our tracks – life goes on. The clock keeps ticking. Days, weeks and months turn into years. The grief that we carry becomes invisible and like it or not we somehow have to find the strength to keep living.
I’ve had counselling, therapy, reflexology. I’ve got an awesome family and wonderful friends who listen and care and walk with me. It all helps but nothing stops the hurting. The loss of a child is a lifetime of sadness and a perpetual cycle of grieving – thankfully permeated by pockets of joy that drive us on.
“The hardest lesson I’ve had to learn as an adult is the relentless need to keep going, no matter how shattered I feel inside.”
– Ernest Hemingway
And the truth is as the years go by it becomes more and more difficult to talk about this hidden internal heaviness and sadness.
In the early days of loss everyone knows you’re heartbroken. You’re expected to grieve – you’re invited to talk about your pain. But as time moves on it’s so easy to find yourself privately wallowing in a swamp of overwhelming sadness that you don’t or can’t talk about. You just bottle it all up until every now and again the bottle pops and everything comes flooding out. You fall apart, have a good holler and the whole process starts over.
My therapy has been to keep writing about what hurts – though not as much as I used to. It doesn’t fix anything but helps. Sometimes just the simple act of putting thoughts into words relieves the pressure in my head and nudges hope into my spirit. Nothing changes because Ben is still gone but for a few moments I feel calmer and more in control.
The other thing that helps is meeting up with friends also living with loss. We draw comfort and strength from each other. We talk, we cry, we listen to our stories, we empathise – by simply sharing our pain we feel less alone. Those precious moments of connection energise us!
We all know that life goes on even when our hearts are breaking. It takes strength we don’t even know we have to find joy in pain. To focus on love rather than loss!
Ernest Hemingway (author) writes…
‘And yet, we endure. That’s the miracle of being human—we endure. Somewhere in the depths of our pain, we find reserves of strength we didn’t know we possessed. We learn to hold space for ourselves, to be the comfort we crave, to whisper words of hope when no one else does. Over time, we realize that resilience isn’t loud or grandiose; it’s a quiet defiance, a refusal to let life’s weight crush us entirely.´
But all this is exhausting and takes it’s toll. There are days when it feels almost impossible to take another step – we’ve all probably been there. But we keep putting one foot in front of the other because we refuse to give up. We do it for ourselves, for our families and most importantly to honour our special person.
I’ve heard it described as:
‘the quiet miracle of survival!’
People might tell us we’re strong but I know I’m not. We all just do what we have to do – driven by love.
For Ben
CREDIT: Ruth McDonald 2025
People rush to get rid of grief because they see it as hanging onto loss. But grief is really hanging onto love which is why you always feel it.
– Riri
