Its 1am, I am up for a pee .. I have some of my best thoughts just before I get up for a pee. Sadly they never seem to stay around to make it to the page a least not in words.
When grief comes as a “double hit,” it feels disorienting because I didn’t just lose people, I lost my place in the web that tied me to them … so far this is what I have learned.
There’s no map. We’re taught grief has stages, or an arc, but when losses stack up close together, it’s more like being thrown into a storm, waves coming from different directions. Some days you’ll grieve one, some days the other, some days both at once.
You may feel misplaced in your own family story. A sister is your peer, your mirror; a mother is your anchor, your origin. Losing both at once can feel like being untethered , as if the roles that defined you either as child or sibling or both have blurred, which in a way they have and in others they have not.
Sometimes I feel pulled to honour one person’s absence and guilty that I’m not “grieving enough” for the other in the same moment. That conflict, it seems is common, and it doesn’t mean I loved one more, just that it is wild difficult!
Oddly Kubler-Ross never mentioned, or if she did I missed, it what I believe is called “Identity-shift grief”. You’re not just mourning them; you’re mourning who you were with them alive.
Like….. when mum died I am still her child in one sense, but the active role of son, the one who popped in everyday on the way home and very probably the one she worried over … is gone. When Janet died, I lost the reflection of myself as “sibling,” someone who knew my childhood from the inside. Those roles can’t be replaced, so this is why I feel unmoored and why I do not know where to put myself right now, I am trying to reassemble a self in a world without them.
My Identity is woven from shared history. Suddenly, the people who carried those memories with me aren’t there, and it feels like I have become the sole keeper. That feels like my past itself has thinned out. I mean … when I imagine myself in future scenes: My mum in the chair in the corner of #22, ,my sister aging alongside me and complaining of her knees (a family failing) . Losing them isn’t just present pain; it’s the loss of the “me” who would have existed in those futures.
Without those relationships to tether me, I feel like I don’t fully recognize who I am now, like I’m half here, half gone. I am also mourning the bit of me, the self I know that died with them.
It’s not a competition, but it can feel like it. It feels like no-one else can know what if feels like to be me. That isolation can make it seem even heavier, particularly at 1 in the morning.
So I need to start slowly building a new sense of self, one that honors the old ties but can also stand in the present, perhaps not today.
.. but most importantly at 1am I realised that in schemes of grief, there isn’t a “place” I’m supposed to fit just now, I am in the raw, in-between space where life has torn open. That’s not wrong, it’s just where I am.
Well that all made sense as I was thinking it and the words needed out, thank you Facebook for giving me the space and you whoever you are for reading it at 1am on a Friday Morning.