Meet Me Here

Chapter 19: Grief

A/N: At this point, I think it is a given that all the chapters have been highly emotional.This is the same...Hugs

☼ ☼ ☼

Grief is an overwhelming emotion. It isn't often that we experience loss or change that can mentally leave us incapacitated, such that we become a mere shattered soul cursed with an eternity of brokenness; never to be complete again.

But, the mind is a powerful tool too.

When faced with a threat, there would always be defence mechanisms set in place, a safety net meant to protect us long enough such that we could stand on our own again.

And the defence mechanism for grief?

It is a whole system of five – or seven, depending on the system you follow – stages, tailored to help one move past their grievances.

Denial. That always comes first.

After experiencing a sudden shift in your life, it is not unusual to respond intensely by simply ignoring the presence of such change. It serves to numb just as it serves as a coping mechanism for a grieving heart. But don't be fooled by such numbness. Past that stage, the emotions you had been suppressing would begin to boil over mercilessly.

During such a time, it will feel as though your emotions came back to haunt you with a vengeance. This time, you can no longer ignore it. Conversely, you are forced to confront the ton of sorrow stirring in your heart, the very one that you denied at the start. It is often difficult, but such is grief.

When that happens, anger is the next natural remedy to grief. More specifically, if denial is a coping mechanism, anger is a masking mechanism. Anger redirects the pain you are carrying in your heart towards another source, be it another person, the person who you are grieving over, and at times, even a deity.

Even if rationality tells you that you are being a monster, you simply can't control those moments of hot fury because the emotions you are experiencing is indescribable, painful and too intense to bear in silence.

Not much is known about how long one will linger at this stage, nor how such anger will manifest. But one thing is for sure, anger masks and the minute it subsides, you will be able to think rationally again and process the emotions without feeling the need to tear a whole room apart – figuratively, I hope.

And then you start to embrace those difficult emotions bit by bit. But this is only just the start.

Bargaining. The next stage of grief.

When anger no longer masks your emotions, you start to feel vulnerable and helpless. As humans, we seek ways to regain control of our spiralling lives and emotions even if our demands can be seen as unreasonable.

But that's just the thing. Is anything truly unreasonable when grief itself justifies all our illogical coping mechanisms borne out of self-preservation and immense pain?

With bargaining, we get our most hated enemies – thoughts revolving around the "what-ifs" and "if only". All bargaining does is give a grieving person some semblance of control, but in doing so, it postpones our face-off with sadness, confusion and hurt that we have to get past to heal.

Then comes the quiet stage; the state of being that parades as a rainbow after the storm but is in fact the storm itself. Depression.

This is also the stage that is immensely difficult to define because each individual deals with this stage differently. Some choose to isolate themselves from others, while others choose to drown in the pools of people. Often, depression can start to feel a little daunting, daunting in the sense that the road ahead may seem foggy, heavy, and overwhelming.