Grief is a subject rarely explored because I was raised to pretend not to know the bad news that befell those closest to me. An answer I often get as a kid was, “It’s alright, there is nothing you have to know.” I grew up getting over upsetting news by jumping onto the next racing train of thoughts and to-dos that passed me by…never letting the heart grieve nor feel the true deepest cuts through it.
Grief, ironically as it sounds, heals.
A best friend told me to slow down, and properly understand the root of the unhappiness within me. Tracing the root of unhappiness was like stepping back along time – not into time – as I tread back the chronological order of events that occured months, years back..those conversations ring fresh in my ears, like they have just been uttered yesterday.
The Kübler-Ross model depicted five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. There are times in life I wonder if I ever passed the stage of denial, for anger was never really in the equation at any one time. Anger might have taken on a disguise, where I sulk within at the fact that I was not given an opportunity to learn from a man whom the world respected. I often wondered how different life would have turned out to be if I went under the influence of my dad, who was an engineer by day, businessman by heart. Would I still have been in the arts? Will I be one of those power-suit clad women striding down the polished marbles of Shenton Way? Or will Singapore cease to exist in my mind at all if I were to take my education overseas?
So many questions, unanswered. Each source rolled on to the other, until they became a network of potential problems, or life – however I saw it. Each fragment of my life brings about a certain joy, and an immense pain that seems never to go away. Depression was long and tough, yet I was certain that there was light at the end of the tunnel, because the sunshine I saw was worth the exploration of grief.
Nothing seems to account for the pain that returns. Each memory I’ve filed in the cupboards of my mind seems to release a certain pang in my heart each time I retrieve it. Nobody mentioned of the potential tears that could well up in your eyes even though you have accepted the subject of grief. I could laugh about a break-up and know it was the a blessing in disguise, but how does one deal with the rolling emotions that come tumbling out each time a stone is shifted?
Going through phases of grief – grows.
Lessons of pain, regret and sadness hopefully steers humans away from making the same mistakes. We emphatise, we feel, we comfort when we know how it is like to go through the process. I once met a man who did not know the pain of losing someone he loved. Maybe he did, but it was all forgotten. I have seen countless forums made up of individuals who dedicate their hearts and digital words to strangers who seek solace. Forums with individuals bound by a common emotion that draws them near in times of weariness. We become more selective with our words for fear of hurting the other party, becoming less critical, simply because the hurt is so familiar, so fresh within us.
Yet our fragile selves continue to pick ourselves up, and live a life ahead. Grief is only but one part of our lives, that serves to intensify the way events in our days pan out, to add a deeper dimension into the multi-complex nature of ours.
