Life is hard. Life with grief is even harder.
My grief journey isn’t really my own. I have others on this journey with me. My mom, my dad and sister. My husband, my kids, my brother-in-law, my niece and nephew.
I often wonder where they’re at with their grief. Without asking them to share, I try to gauge it when I bring up Derek in conversation.
And it’s not that I want to compare my level of grief with theirs, because I know very well that their grief is insurmountable like mine. I guess there’s a level of comfort in knowing that they feel exactly the same way that I do. As much as I used to think we were all so different, we have more in common than ever before.
I watched Brene Brown’s presentation The Call to Courage tonight. About 45 minutes in, she started talking about gratitude and joy. She talked about how we tend to shy away from gratitude and its vulnerability for fear of something bad happening.
This is how I used to think. I used to think about the other shoe dropping all the time. I had a great day at work, my boss gave me a great review, my husband and the kids are good, our finances look okay, we have everything we’d ever want and need and then some…..and then, boom, like a tree hitting the ground, it’s changed in an instant.
That was my life leading up to Derek’s tragic death. That was my fear – something bad happening to me. Something bad did happen to me. It happened to us. It happened to my poor brother. It affected my entire family in an instant.
We are all in the same boat. We’re all grieving everyday in our own ways. We have this experience that rocked us all. And we need each other more than ever.
I don’t have a fancy title or a SME, but I know grief. I know the ins and outs, ups and downs, twists and turns. I know a good day versus a bad day, when to bring it up and when no to, how to express my emotions and who to share them with.
My family knows the same.
As we journey through life with grief, there is gratitude for those moments that we’ll never get back. Memories we’re now recalling from the depths of our brain of the good times. Stories that we wish we could laugh about together. Things we wish we could say to him now. Gratitude keeps us going. Gratitude helps us heal. Gratitude gives us hope. Joy. Shows us how to love in the midst of loss.
Grieving Sibling Loss 