I Don't Want to Be Good at Grief Anymore

I am tired.

And I don't mean I need more sleep.

I mean I am tired of losing people I love.

I've lost grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, my mother-in-law, recently my stepmother-in-law, and my dad.

I've watched people I love fight for the health of their children. I've watched friends and family sit beside hospital beds, wait for test results, hope desperately for different outcomes, and somehow keep putting one foot in front of the other when those outcomes weren't what they hope and prayed for.

And today I found myself thinking: I don't want to be good at this anymore.

I don't want to know what grief feels like in my body or that the first holidays will be hard. I don't want to know that grief will show up unexpectedly, or that years later something completely ordinary can bring someone rushing back to me.

I don't want another opportunity to practice letting go. I already know how to do this, and I just don't want to anymore.

I've come to realize this tired is a different kind of tired.

There is the tired that comes from not sleeping enough or doing too much, and then there is the kind that settles somewhere deeper. The kind that comes from carrying things we can't change and worrying about people we love. From watching someone hurt and knowing there is absolutely nothing we can do to make it better.

Maybe some of it comes from getting old enough to know more about what it means to grieve, to lose people.

There was a time when I knew, of course, that people I loved wouldn't always be here. I understood that. But knowing something and knowing something are two different things.

Now I know.

I know what an empty chair feels like. I know what it's like to so badly want to call someone who isn't there to answer. I know that life keeps moving when part of you wants it to stop for just a minute and acknowledge that someone who mattered is no longer here, or that someone is hurting and we can't make it go away.

Maybe part of this tiredness is knowing I will have to do it again. I don't really like admitting that, thought.

It feels almost ungrateful somehow, because there is so much good in life and so much I am grateful for. And I've started to realize that understanding something doesn't make it easier to carry. Gratitude doesn't cancel grief and knowing that sickness and death are part of life doesn't mean we have to be okay with how much it hurts.

We can understand that grief is part of loving people and still be tired of grieving.

Maybe You Know This Tired Too

Maybe you've lost someone you love, or maybe someone you love is sick right now.

Maybe you're watching your parents get older, watching someone you love fight for their child, their spouse, their parent, or themselves. Or maybe there hasn't been one enormous thing at all. Maybe there have just been enough hard things, close enough together, that somewhere along the way you became emotionally tired.

The strange thing is, we can look completely fine while carrying it. We go to work and answer texts, we make dinner, we laugh, we make plans, we show up for the people we love.

Life keeps happening right alongside grief.

Somewhere underneath all of that can be this quiet little voice saying, I'm tired.

There is something so very human about that.

It doesn't mean we've lost hope or that we aren't grateful for the lives we have. It doesn't mean we're doing grief wrong. It might just means we've loved a lot and carried a lot for a long time.

I See You

Maybe that's really all I wanted to say with this.

I don't have a lesson about grief today. I don't have five steps to move through it. And I'm not really in the mood to find the beautiful reframe.

Yes, there are days for meaning-making, and then I think there are days when we just need another human being to sit beside us and recognize that this is hard.

So if you know this particular kind of tired, I see you.

Especially if you've gotten really good at surviving things you never wanted to have to survive.

I understand why a part of you might be saying, I don't want to be good at this anymore.

Neither do I.

And Still, I Would Choose the Loving

And there it is….the contradiction.

Because as tired as I am of losing people, I wouldn't give up loving them to avoid the grief.

I would still choose my dad. I would still choose my grandparents and the people whose absence has left spaces in my life.

I'd choose the ordinary days again with the laughter, the hardships, the memories. All of it.

I think this is one of the terribly beautiful and painful parts of being human. We get to love people deeply, but we don't get to keep them here forever, even if I wish we did.

Maybe today I don't need to do anything with that truth. I don't need to make myself feel better about it. I don't need to turn grief into growth or find the lesson in it.

I'm just tired. Maybe you are too.

If you are, there is nothing wrong with you for feeling that way.

You don't have to be good at grief today. Neither do I.

We can just be human in it, together.