Processing the Process - Part 2

Grief is a funky thing.

I keep trying to remind myself of the five stages of grief and push through them with everything lost this year: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance. Denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance. One, two, three, four, five. These stages, steps, movements through emotions are logical and calculated and outlined and easy, right? That’s why we reduce complex emotions and exclamations of feelings into single words that we can use as a label for our outbursts or lack thereof.

Then why the heck am I still so gosh damn sad?

I keep looking back on this year, and, though I know and reminded myself and accepted that things will never go back to the normal I once knew, I miss the life and person I once was. I miss being able to pretend that everything was “okey” and the things that bothered me were just part of life. I miss the people I have lost or let go of and the memories that I shaped into something better than what they were to make myself feel better. I miss being able to trick myself into feeling better. I miss the simplicity and naïvety I took for granted and how much weight that they carried.

Growth is not linear, and I guess grief isn’t either. No wonder adults constantly talk about the years where they just didn’t know everything.

I consider myself an optimist. Heck, I might even call myself and enthusiast because the little things in life are the most important things to me. I am so thankful for the person who holds the door open for me and try to express it in the .6 seconds of eye contact I can make as I pass through. I will never feel that I have shown enough appreciation to the friends who have let me cry and crash on couches though they may think nothing of it in the future. These small moments of kindness and understanding, of taking a small load off of the overbearing pressure of existence, bring me more hope than I will ever understand. I will never know if that person believes or respects the same ideals I do, but they know that the cup of coffee they paid for me will make my day a little brighter.

But what happens when there are no more small things?

Our lives have been thrown into extremes. Knowing and not knowing, growing and not growing, wearing and not wearing, we are so polarized in our actions and thoughts, and the small things, the opportunity for unconscious acts of human kindness, are missing. I miss them. I miss them so much. I miss the hug from the friends and pennies on the sidewalk and smiling at kids in line at the grocery store.

I may have gone through the five stages of grief, but I still miss it. Today, I am a little more sad for what we’ve lost, and that’s just okey.