It’s a quarter past one and I’m not even a little drunk (I have gotten some drunk texts though) but I have this urge to write out a little bit or maybe a lot of what’s been going on in my mind lately.
I lost my grandma last month. It wasn’t the best feeling to go through and just some days letter, I felt myself build a wall around in the hope that I wouldn’t go crazy and feel protected somehow. I don’t know how my mind felt the need to do that, but it was very science-like and I had little control. Self-preservation, I guess. There were nights when my head hit the pillow that there would be this really tight feeling in my heart the moment I started thinking about her. I wonder if that was how immense guilt felt like. It still happens from time to time but it goes to anger and sadness, back to helplessness and just the wish that there was something we all could have done.
She was great but it was hard to see all of that in your time of stress. How did I get to be so selfish? I wish I had more experience in this part to know what the right way to deal with this is. Right now, I’m just fighting myself wishing she could be back here at my wedding to the love of my life. It’s so dumb that she can’t. She might still be there, I don’t know.
It has been a tough October and though my family has been functioning almost normally, for the sake of planning my wedding, there are still times we see the truth. Either crying or extreme spacing out, or just the time when we realize we have to do A, B or C differently because Grandma won’t be there around this time. Or any other time. It sort of blows.
I am trying my very best to face it. I feel very detached and sort emotionless when I think, “Oh, she’s dead and not coming back.”
The truth is we have to move on. We have to find new ways to fill spaces left by the unexpected. Coping skills aren’t something that just come to us by virtue of being human. We learn to cope from a very young age and it is our families that play a big role in it all. So if ever you feel like there’s something you can’t handle and there’s nobody to talk to, you just go back to the basics. You go to your family. Nobody will ever push you away. And if you feel that a friend is as good as a family member, you latch on to that because if you can’t fight it on your own, somebody else will carry half your ammunition so you can.
It’s a horrible world. But from time to time, we get to see our blessings. With grandma, that process is slowly taking shape.