#coping with grief
CPTSD vent art. My symptoms are getting worse and resistant to my medication
If you’ve followed me for a while, you’ll know that I planted these bougainvilleas when my stepdad and dad passed away.
I live on the central coast of California, and it gets foggy and it is a bit more chilly. And even though bougainvilleas love lots of sun, they are growing and look at all the blooms! Makes me so happy!
If you’ve lost someone, get a plant in their name. Make a commitment to take care of it and grow it. Doing so has helped me so damn much!
The plan is to grow the bougainvilleas and make a wall. On the bottom, I’m going black berries and making them fall down the container.
I wander past the funeral parlor on my way, the one where we bought your headstone. There’s always a lady smoking outside of it and I wonder if the irony is clear to me alone.
You gave up smoking your pipe years ago, before I was ever even considered or born. The love of your life didn’t like it so much, and so you traded the smoke for love’s touch.
-there’s smoke outside the funeral parlor
This week I broke down in the car.
I saw your house for the first time since and I remembered that you don’t live there anymore. That you will never live there, or anywhere, again.
As soon as the car door shut behind me, it all hit me again and I couldn’t breathe. It feels harder and harder to grasp air these days, like my lungs are always heavy, my heart too full of lost love to pump with any vigour.
It comes in waves, cruel torrents, natural disasters that strike when I think I’m okay now and that the pain is easing. Grief rushes in and fills every space, unwanted and unrelenting until there’s no room for much of anything else.
I miss you more and more, and grief will not stop creeping into every corner of my heart.
“hurt and grieve but don’t suffer alone”
“today of all days”
“there may not be meaning so find one and seize it”
“the most dangerous thing is to love”
“you will heal and you’ll rise above”
“it’s more courageous to overcome”
-achilles come down Gang of Youths
When a horse died at a ranch I go to, the owner immediately took his name off EVERYTHING, snatching papers and yelling ‘this is triggering!’ and not letting anyone get a word in.
This horse was loved and many people had to grieve, but she was trying to erase his existence. That’s not how you grieve. That is how you avoid pain. She was not only hurting herself by not processing, she was hurting others by telling everyone never to mention him, don’t ask, he’s gone and that’s it. Pain is needed to grieve. Pain is needed to move on.
I don’t think grief is a feeling I’ll ever get used to, in any of it’s forms. The floor falling out from beneath your feet. Your heart and stomach dropping with it.
and he gifted me such pain whose grief reached the very criveses of my soul
All my grief says the same thing— this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. And the world laughs, holds my hope by my throat, says: but this is how it is.
Fortesa Latifi//The Truth About Grief
