The Grief Closet

It was a sad day. Even though the sky was blue, she just felt low, and sad and teary. There was no obvious reason to be sad, she just was.

She chatted with her cousin, recently returned from 10 years overseas, just like her.

‘I just miss Indonesia so much! I’ve had a terrible headache all week and I’m very teary,’ her cousin wrote, after sharing with various groups about their time away. ‘It has opened a floodgate of grief.’

‘I know the grief,’ she wrote back. She pictured a closet where she has conveniently tried to stuff the past 10 years. It hurts to think and feel.

Yet sometimes, when she least expects it, the overstuffed closet doors fling open and everything inside spews out and she’s left with a mess.

Is it possible to take things out of the closet, little by little and find a place for them? Maybe over time. Right now, it all still feels raw.

Sad days will come, and that’s ok. There’s a lot to be missed about a place and people she has loved and have become part of who she is. A dear friend had sent her a quote before she left that strikes her again as true:

‘You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, I told him, like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.’ Azar Nafisi

So not only is that cupboard stuffed full of people, places, food, language and things, there’s parts of her too. She’ll never be the way she was, ever again.

‘So my dear,’ she wrote to her beautiful cousin, ‘Let’s you and I sit in the mess together today.’

And she felt the sadness lift a little… sadness shared is not so heavy.