Giving Myself Permission to Grieve

I lost a friend last week. A childhood friend lost her battle with thyroid cancer. We grew up together and had reconnected a few years ago when she moved back to the area. She and her family then moved again and we’d been keeping in touch mostly on social media. But now she’s gone.

I’ve been kind of numb since it happened. I wasn’t able to attend her funeral or even watch the live stream. (Yes, it was live streamed. Because that’s how far her reach was. Just by being herself she had made friends in real life and social media all over the country). My husband and I were away at a marriage conference and I woke up with nightmares, in no way related, but as I coped with the disturbing dreams, I found myself coming to terms with her loss. That her little boy, around the same age as my daughter, has lost his mother and her devoted and supportive husband has lost his wife and best friend.

We had planned to spend time together next time my husband was in her city on business. This past January I couldn’t get away and they were just returning from a vacation. “Next year,” we said. Except now there won’t be a next year.

I don’t know what to do with this. Because this is a new kind of grief to me. Another mom, someone I grew up with who is about my age. I am suddenly, acutely aware of the shortness of life. I feel angry at the injustice of it, and furious about death itself. My husband gently reminds me that this is because none of us was meant for death. It is the scourge of a broken, fallen world.

I don’t have a good history of dealing with grief. I get past it fairly well, but I don’t move through it. The temptation is to try and move on, as quickly as possible. To remember her fondly, and then try to separate myself emotionally. Instead of dealing with my own fear of death and the immense anger and sadness that overwhelms me, I just want to distract myself or stay busy enough that I can push it down instead. But I need to pause and make room for the grief.

I don’t want to. I want to just keep going on and pretend like this isn’t a real thing. That it won’t happen to me, or my husband, my parents or my children. But that isn’t real. I need to find the line between living in terror and the realistic possibility that death eventually comes to us all. So far I’ve been short with my kids when they arguing over kid things like who touched who with their feet and who ripped whose coloring pages. When what I really want to do is hug them and tell them everything they will ever need to know in case I’m not there later. I don’t want to be alone and yet I want the whole world to go away.

I need to take a pause to  let myself experience grief, in all its bubbling, boiling anger and its crushing sadness and sense of loss. As I walk through this I find myself reliving other losses in my life. People I’ve loved that I lost as a child and I find myself regrieving for as an adult. As if my grief, never having entirely left me, has matured and now must be dealt with on those new terms. I find myself saddened by the aunt and uncle my children will never know and the great grandmother they will remember little, if at all.

Sometimes my chest feels tight and I can’t quite draw breath when I think about my own mortality. I know as a person of faith this shouldn’t be an issue. But for me, it still is. It’s something I’ve been putting off dealing with for a long time. But now another window has been opened to me. Do I take my anger, my grief and my loss to the throne of heaven? Or do I tuck it away again, and hope I keep stay busy enough, move fast enough, it will eventually fade into the distance until the next time?

My fear is that there is no coming through it. What if this is a fear I must simply carry all my days on this earth? I don’t have answers. But I also know that I don’t want the black cloud to stalk me any longer.