The Days After

Stage 3: Anger

It is said that the third stage of grief is anger. Perhaps because we tend to feel angry when someone dies or in my case when you yourself die. Death is inevitable, so the fact that we can't prevent it makes us angry. Well, at least I think so. You see I'm a dead girl, not a psychologist.

Anger is not a clean emotion. It can be raw and red and hot or quiet, cold even. Anger can be the roaring sea or the winds of a hurricane leveling forests. It is not a particularly pretty thing. Anger is what got Alex limping out of a dark alleyway late one night and it is what boiled inside me when I looked at the bruises that stained his skin.

In the two months since I died, I've seen first hand just how horrible this stage can be. Because anger and fear easily consume someone when there is nothing left to hope for. And death has a way of extinguishing hope.

I watched my parents go through the anger stage first. They fought a lot over stupid meaningless things and their hard earned money went to bottles of expensive wine instead of the groceries that would have usually filled the now empty fridge. It wasn't like I could just tell them to get over it or that I could tell them anything at all. I wanted too but then again I wanted to do a hell of a lot of things. I wanted something other than expired condiments in the fridge and I wanted them to talk to each other. I didn't want them to buy fresh bread as much as I wanted to live again but it was important to me that my parents stayed healthy. It seems I will want and want but never have.

They didn't seem to be healthy, both in the physical and mental kind of way. Watching old french movies without subtitles while drinking overly priced red wine when you had work in four hours did not seem like healing to me. I wanted them to at least clean the kitchen or go out and laugh again. But they were angry. Angry at the world. They were angry because they couldn't save their daughter. They would never say it out loud but I knew that they wished that it had been someone else's daughter. It was the way their eyes seemed to narrow at happy families in the park. Or how they never liked the videos of cute children on facebook anymore. They would have been able to show me those pictures to make me smile and we would have been that laughing family on the park bench. That had been taken away from them.

Their anger stage was a calmer one despite everything, filled with seclusion and silence. I can't say the same about Vanessa's.

Vanessa's parents forced her to go to a therapist so she could talk to someone. That didn't sit well with her and during every session that I watched she was rude and did nothing to help herself. Her parents were paying the guy to listen to her insults and sarcasm for an hour two times a week. Van also plummeted in her grades and she started to pick fights and start drama. Although annoying the prissy teen girls that dominated the feeble social structure of high school was almost enjoyable to watch even as a dead girl, it didn't get her anywhere. I figured she was doing it to take her mind off me. She would never forgive the world that had taken me away from her. I don't think I can forgive this world either. This world took me away from her.

Usually, whenever she did something stupid she would come to me and we would hide away in the bathroom during lunch so the ticked off cheerleading squad couldn't kill her. Now Vanessa just stayed in the stall alone and cried and rubbed at her eyes until they were the colour of her chipped, red nail polish. Her anger stage was loud and yet no one but me seemed to hear it.

Alex wasn't doing so well either and I witnessed first hand this fact last night. He wasn't home when I went to his room to lie with him like I did most nights. It wasn't comforting to him but I found a small joy in watching him fall asleep. It wasn't that I was creeping on him (well completely) but it was nice to see his face turn soft and for his eyes to close so I could no longer see the violent storms that often swam in them. Alex looked peaceful when he slept. I liked to imagine that he was happy as well. Somewhere inside him, there must have been happiness.