I don’t remember how I found out my grandpa died.
Not in detail anyway; I think my brain blocked most of that out for my own sanity.
I don’t remember what my mom said to me as I sat on the couch, but I do remember how I felt.
Heartbroken. Empty.
My world wholly crumbled.
I don’t think I really understood the concept of the “5 stages of grief” until then. What I found was that grief and the experience of grief are not always in line with what we are accustomed to believing they will be like. Not really.
Anyone who knew my grandpa Jack knew he was a real catch. His favorite saying was “let’s go to bed so these people can go home,” and he never missed a chance to pick on his grandkids in good fun. His nickname for me was Bigfoot because, according to him, I walked too loud, and he always had something to say about my ripped jeans. It was our thing.
When my grandpa loved, he loved deeply. He’d give the shirt off his back to help others. Not once did he complain about taking in family or friends when they needed a place to stay.
Most of all, Grandpa was resilient. In the couple of years leading up to his passing, he was dealt awful cards. Nevertheless, he faced every challenge with his typical jokes and a million-dollar smile.
A couple of weeks before he died, he ended up in the hospital. He made a joke about the ripped shorts I wore to go see him – of course. I made sure to write the comment down because I knew that it would probably be one of the last times I’d heard him say something like that. To this day, I can still hear him saying it in my head:
“Of course, couldn’t go without them shorts.”
For weeks, rational thought had no home inside my brain.
This has to be a mistake, I thought, he can’t really be dead. How can he be? He survived so many things that should have killed him before. It doesn’t make any sense.
Naively so, part of me believed that I would wake up and, by some miracle, he’d be alive and well. That, or I’d wake up and realize it was all just a terrible, terrible nightmare. At eighteen years old I believed that.
I actively denied my own reality. Stage one.
I wrote his obituary. I cracked jokes sitting at the kitchen table as I wrote everything down. You’d think the simple action of writing “…passed away on September 3rd, 2022” would make everything more real.
It didn’t.
I cried alone for the most part, save for the initial blow. Instead, I took on the consolation role. I shut my own emotions out and comforted everyone but myself. I hated the feeling of being comforted at the time.
Reality set in as I kissed the top of his casket in goodbye and watched it lower into the ground – the first wave of acceptance.
Depression, anger and bargaining occurred almost simultaneously, mixing together all of the boiling emotions I finally let myself feel.
Some days, I wanted to do nothing. I wanted to feel nothing. If I wasn’t in a position to think about anything else, I thought about my grandpa. I wished I could just shut my brain off.
On my weekends home from college, I’d sit in front of the heaping pile of dirt that marked my grandpa’s spot at the cemetery. I’d talk about my week and the ongoing events in my life. I’d tell him about the stories I’d written for The Bulletin or some stupid thing I had done that I knew he’d laugh at me for.
Eventually, sitting on the ground and looking up at the sky, I’d ask him: Why did you have to leave? Why’d you leave me alone?
I wished it had been me. I hated being made to live a life without my grandpa, and so many things would I have exchanged to get even just one more minute with him. I hated being made to continue my day-to-day knowing a big piece of my heart was no longer, that it had been ripped from me. I hated the world.
As months went on life got easier, and somewhere between the sixth and seventh-month mark, around the end of March, I accepted my reality for the second time. An added sense of contentment emerged that I didn’t have before: I would be okay.
Just because he was gone didn’t mean my memories with him left too, nor did it mean the almost nineteen years I had with him didn’t matter.
As I look back on the past year and what grief looks like for me, I supply to you this: how we grieve is not always linear. We shouldn’t be socialized to believe that it is.
Each step of the poorly-worded “5 stages of grief” can be experienced multiple times and in multiple different ways. Whether it’s one slight shift in the 5-stage order or turning the whole order on its head, the act of grieving looks different for everyone.
Instead of calling the experience of grief the “5 stages of grief,” we should simply just call it what it is: grief. The former insinuates linearity, and sets us up for an experience that may not occur in the way we think. Hardly is grief moving from one stage to another in order.
For me, it surely wasn’t.