Grief is lonely

I know this blog is called happiness in grief, but I do want to also talk about the actual difficulties of grief, most notably at the moment for me it's the loneliness and emptiness.

Even after having spent a day surrounded by family and friends, the day inevitably always ends and you always come to that point in the evenings when people go home back to their families back to their lives and it’s just you, you and only you. Nobody there to help cook the dinner, nobody there to talk about your day with, nobody there to watch TV with and then the bed is empty again. You are alone again.

I think that that is something that unless you’ve experienced a loss, you just will never fully understand the weight of that loneliness and how you can feel sometimes like you’re the only person experiencing it. I know that there are probably many many more people out there who understand this feeling that I’m describing, but when every evening, every day it’s the same it just feels like you’re the only one. And it’s such a draining loneliness because it’s not a loneliness in the sense that you’ve not seen or spoken to any other person throughout the day it’s that you can’t speak to your person, the one person you would wish most to speak to. And that weighs and weighs on you because you know it’s not just that you can’t talk to them because they are somewhere else or they are busy or they’re asleep. You know that you will never ever be able to talk to him again and that just for me personally sends my mind a bit spinning, I can’t comprehend that he’s gone like fully gone. How is that even a thing, it’s like you know when you think of the universe having no limits like how can something have no limits. How can somebody just be gone, it just doesn’t make sense and it hurts my brain.

So yeah, the evenings are the hardest times for me. And it’s always hard going out and seeing friends especially my friends who also have children the same age as J, and seeing the dads interact with the kids and its just this sharp weight I guess it’s like somebody handing me a ton of bricks and my heart just sinks. I just want that more than anything in the world, to know how it could’ve been with Ric and J and how their relationship would’ve been and also just to have that support system for me, you know to be able to go to an event, and be two people watching out for a hyperactive very speedy toddler. But it is just me I am a one woman band so to speak and it’s exhausting. Sometimes I appreciate that somebody today asked me how I was doing and I said yeah I’m OK and then they said no really how are you doing like I don’t know maybe she understood or maybe it could be seen on my face that somethings weighing on me at the moment, but it was just nice to be asked, because honestly not many people do. And that's something about grief that unless you’ve experienced it yourself, you’re never going to fully understand how somebody’s feeling. Sure you can try to imagine but you’ll never know the feeling, it’s very hard to describe but like I’ve mentioned several times already it feels like this weight. A little like that typical weight on your shoulders but it’s like there’s a weight in your heart. And to go along with the happiness in grief idea, sometimes that weight is lifted and throughout the day you’ll have those nice moments with family and friends where you can laugh, you can have fun and for a moment that weight is lifted, not fully as I don’t think it’s ever fully lifted. I feel like there will always be a little something heavy tied to my heart, pulling it down slightly all the time but sometimes it gets lighter and those moments are nice.

So yeah that’s my take on grief at this particular moment in time that it’s always there a little bit and it’s just this heavy heavy thing to have to carry around. And the thing is it’s an invisible heavy thing and the majority of people won’t know what’s happened or what you’re going through even the people closest to you won't understand and it’s just fucking lonely. Sometimes a lot of the times. I’m always grateful that I have my little buddy so I’m never truly alone, and he makes me laugh. He does put a smile on my face always even on the tough exhausting days. I’m grateful to him for that. I’m very lucky to have him as my buddy for life but I just wish that we had our Ric with us too.

Lonliness is just one of the things that I've experienced on my grief journey, there are of course many more feelings and emotions, ups and downs. I will talk about those in another post.

I just felt like at the moment the loneliness is the thing I'm feeling the most. Every evening there's a moment where I'll look at the mess I have to clean up alone, or the empty side of the sofa and just wish more than anything that he was here with me. I miss his presence and his company so much.

Grief is hard and it's fucking lonely.