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Personal Narrative: My Experience With Grief

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I don't know what grief feels like to others but I know what it feels for me. Here is my experience with grief.

Grief is personal.
You’ve probably read the 7 or 9 or whatever stages of grief but the truth is each person grieves differently and the stages happen in no particular order or not at all or all at once. When my brother died helpful people asked me why on earth wasn’t I crying. I didn’t cry at all, not a single tear, for the first couple of weeks. After that I did, but never as much as would be considered by the general population the “correct amount”. Rather than sitting in a corner to sob what I wanted was to run. It was a fight; or a flight. It didn’t feel like I had lost someone. It felt like I was in danger. The whole world is on another planet far, far away …show more content…
Or even “Be brave.”
I know they mean well, but this feels like you are being slapped. It’s a form of aggression. This sadness is mine, and you can’t touch it. So back off. But thank you. You feel (and this is so horrible it hurts to write it) like you are going to forget the person that you lost.
It’s so shocking for a person to be there and then to not be there that it feels like everything they were will disappear. I fear I won’t remember my brother’s voice or the warmth in his presence or his sense of humour or his soft hands or the way he moved his leg when he was thinking of something important or the frequently astounding things he used to say when I asked for his opinion. So what does a grieving person want? For the whole world to grind to a halt? Why, yes. We want, in words of W.H. Auden, to “stop all the clocks.” We want “an airplane to scribble on the sky the message He is Dead”. We want “the stars put out, the moon packed up, the sun dismantled, the ocean poured away.” But we understand this isn’t reasonable, so ask instead for patience as we very slowly step back out into this new world that no longer includes a person who once determined its

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