SOMETIMES

GRIEF

To grieve is to lose, and to lose is to break, and to break is to be torn apart and to be torn apart is to die slowly, steadily, one day at a time.

To grieve means remembering all over again the gut-wrenching shock and loss you feel when the one you love is no more. Grief is also remembering the life that once was before the final breath. It is the bittersweet feeling of appreciating the memories made while still mourning the ones that never will. To grieve is to part ways. It is a final goodbye, with no final waves or last smiles of 'See you' tomorrow.'

Grief is also anger. Hot coal-like anger over the abruptness of losing a life, a soul, a friend, a loved one. It is the hate of being ripped away from someone you had planned to live more with and do more with. It is the denial, the refusal to accept that death has come. Grief is also stubbornness - refusing defeat, refusing the loss. It is refusing to come to terms with the fact that you'll have to adjust and move on with life because you're the one above ground and not six feet under.

Grief is also being lost and feeling lost. It is not knowing what to do and where to go. It is not knowing what comes next. It is the crippling anxiety of the unknown. Perhaps that's something one must come to terms with...that we'll never know, that we must live life as best as we can, as loudly as we can, and as fully as we can, with those that we love, for those moments are the only long-lasting moments you have with them after they are gone. They are priceless.

Grief is also not linear. It is a multilayered spiral that keeps on going and going. The twists and turns take you on a rollercoaster ride that has no end. I liken it to a nightmare that you wake up to only to get back to when you go to sleep again at night. Grief is the harshest and loudest emotion I've ever felt. It is consuming, confronting, and exposing. It reveals the darkest, most ugliest sides of us, but it also reveals the truest, most genuine sides to us. The revelations that come come at a cost, and that cost is loss. That cost is grief.

I ask myself all the time if I've lost so much, or if I haven't lost as much.

But one thing I know....I hate death, and I hate grief.