Saturday, February 08, 2025

Opinion

This thing called grief 

How do you define grief – that all-encompassing emotion that shackles you to your roots, pushing you into an eternal memory loop?

By Suzy Fontes

info@thearabianstories.com

Friday, June 14, 2024

Grief isn’t the absence of joy. It is an adjunct to life’s ongoing hustle. It is a monologue: at times dripping with self-pity, at times spiraling out of control without provocation.

Even amidst moments of sheer bliss, there is this gnawing thought that you need a little pinch of grief in it to balance things out. It is this overwhelming belief that unacknowledged grief will return in a new avatar.

Or perhaps, it is this thought, this feeling that you need to hush the reality, to make time for the one who is no longer in your life. You want the memories to stay fresh as if it happened this year, or just yesterday.

What is grief to you? Is it the need to cry…to bring out memories of the person who is gone?

Some of us wallow in self-pity and some others seek comfort in reliving the very moments that caused grief. When we stare out at the horizon or zone out at the computer table, in those little moments before reality presses in, we go on a time travel back to that time, that place, when that someone we now miss was so much a part of our world. And then we wish, heart-achingly wish that we had done that, gone there, bought this, ate here, traveled somewhere… 

Making a checklist of all the unfulfilled desires that person would have ever shared or hinted at.

And then we wish for another chance to make it possible – just an hour, a day to reclaim all the lost spaces and fill them with newer memories; memories of fulfilled desires. 

We talk about celebrating life after losing someone to death; but, in the confines of our minds, we want to experience the ache and the pain that comes with every thought of the person who is no longer here. 

Unlike anger, grief doesn’t subside at the count of one to ten.

It stays with us as a reminder of the shared love.

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