The cynical optimist

I’ve found myself thinking a lot about grief lately and my experiences with it in my own life.

Grief isn’t something easy to talk about, or something I necessarily ever thought I’d be writing a blog post about but when something sticks around like this I usually find that I have to write it.

One of my earliest experiences with grief at least grief that I understood to be grief was when my grandmother passed away. I didn’t cry at the news at least not right away, I decided not to go the funeral because I was still trying to shelter myself from facing death like that and it wasn’t until weeks later when we were visiting my grandfather that I broke down.

It was my first time being in the house without my grandmother being there and remember looking around and the memories played like a movie in my head and then I had the crashing and sudden realization that no more memories would be made there, at least not ones with her in it and I felt the emotion starting to build up but I fought the urge to let it out until the elevator doors closed on our way back down to the first floor and back to our car. As soon as they closed I burst into tears and didn’t stop crying until we left the elevator.

Grief can do that to you, especially if you are dealing with delayed grief like I was. Sometimes even something completely innocuous can trigger a wave of grief that overtakes you for awhile.

I think I’m coming to the realization now that some of the ups and downs i’ve been facing during this pandemic have not been about isolation or the sense that the world is turning upside down, though that has certainly played a part. I think I’ve just been dealing with waves of grief.

Here in the U.S. we just crossed 500,000 deaths attributed to the Coronavirus and that is unthinkable. I remember thinking that 100,000 was bad, 200,000….unimaginable, but we have gone so far beyond what was in the realm of possibility 500,000 lives lost in close to a year.

I was watching the news the day we crossed that grim milestone and I almost broke down as I tried to comprehend such loss, how do you even grieve for half a million people? Can you even grieve for that many?  I don’t have any answers for that, and I’m not going to pretend to , it won’t do any good.

I can tell you what’s helped me though and that’s been community. It’s something that I’ve been working on for awhile allowing myself to be part of a community instead of floating on the periphery of them. This blog has helped me out a lot allowing myself a small community to write to and grieve with even if it’s only a few people that read this. The writing community on twitter has helped me as well because I get to celebrate the successes of the amazing writers there and any good news nowadays help and the Nerdfighter community which I’ve been around for years now but never really active in has helped a lot because of the Project for Awesome event that happened last weekend, where the community raised over 2 million dollars for charities around the world. It filled me with hope and faith again in a way I’ve been sorely missing. We came together, we celebrated, we connected and healed a bit.

I’m still working my way back to some of the other communities that I had abandoned and I’m hoping they welcome me back, but I guess for me when the grief became to much I did what was human and reached out.

In no way am I saying that it fixed everything, there are some days where I feel overwhelmed with everything going on but being a part of so many amazing communities has really eased the burden. I also don’t know how much longer we will be in this, how much worse it may get but there seems to be hope on the horizon, vaccines are rolling out, cases are declining and maybe, just maybe the sun is beginning to rise on one of the darkest nights.