meditations on the wrong way to grieve

There’s a lovely term in Thai that, translated directly, means “warm-heart”—as in a feeling of warmth in your heart—and essentially refers to the feeling of warmth, comfort and security. Like when you’re around people you love, when you feel safe and seen—the way the warmth of it settles around your heart. I have been trying for years to figure out how and where my grief has taken root, and I realized today that much of it is in how that feeling—warm in my heart—has eroded away.

This isn’t meant to be a depressing piece, I promise. I have been trying for days to come up with interesting essay topics, to plan and outline and draft in my head, but it’s all been inexplicably stalled (I blame a recent bout of the flu)—and here we have this instead. A piece of softness and clarity, hopefully, while the rest of my brain works itself back into gear.

My family’s dog, the beautiful, cheeky soul who was my partner in crime from the time I was six years old, passed away after years of slow deterioration right as my grandpa was preparing for open heart surgery. One year later, a day after my seventeenth birthday, my grandpa passed away after a year of illness. If, before all this happened, you’d outlined these events, and asked me to imagine the days and months that followed, I would have imagined an implosion. A shift in the fabric of my world. A big, gaping hole, the indelible impact of sorrow.

Instead, after months spent in the hospital, watching ambulances pull away from the door of my grandparents’ home, months of stress and pain, years of losing sleep as an elderly dog screamed through the nights, late nights rushing to the vet, after it was all over, life…. slowly went back to normal.

There was joy. My cousin had a baby, the first great-grandchild of the family, a beautiful, beaming little ray of sunshine. Another cousin had a daughter, almost a year later, born on the second anniversary of my grandpa’s passing. I finished school; started working in my parents’ studio. We narrowly escaped a catastrophic flood. We lived through an earthquake (again) (it’s a long story). I still don’t know how to drive. I stare up and waggle my eyebrows at the portrait of my grandpa smiling over the kitchen table all the time, commiserating whenever my parents start to bicker. Both my grandmothers, now widowed, have continued living their lives with awe-inspiring grace and dignity.

I remember with vivid clarity every single person who was stunningly kind to me when times were difficult. The friends who checked in over and over, regardless of whether I’d managed to reply, patient and steady in their support. The lifelong friend of my parents’ who hugged me with such warmth at my grandpa’s funeral, the love in the way her hands remained lightly on my shoulders as people crowded around. The way another friend of my mom’s, of Chinese heritage, cheerfully called herself “Masi” (auntie) without a second thought and taught everyone in her immediate vicinity the correct etiquette for entering a Namdhari Gurdwara while I stood by in slightly awed bewilderment. I remember laughing with my cousin through trying to wrangle a print shop into making cards at top speed for the funeral. Munching a slice of pizza at some late hour on the way to a 24hr supermarket, that same cousin and his wife prodding me into picking out fruit to take home. The lot of us pouring outside in sweatpants and slippers to greet and probably scare the bejeesus out of another cousin’s boyfriend (now fiancé—apparently we didn’t scare him that badly) for the first time.

It’s an unthinkably overused cliche, but life does go on.

All the while, I waited for the grief to hit.

It’s been three years. It still hasn’t.

And yet.

I hold onto the reminder that everyone experiences grief differently. I hold onto the reminder that I am not broken, heartless, or wrong. I wrote poem after poem about loss and grief and told people that I was still waiting for the train to arrive. I look back on those poems now and realize I was not outside my family’s grief. I was not separate, or lost. I was living through loss the best way I knew how, which was simply to carry on, and let my heart do what it would.

It’s been a handful of years. These days, I feel a little worn-thin. I listen to songs about loss and roll my eyes at some, play others on repeat. I miss my grandpa like an ache in my bones, but only when I think of it. Of him. Things hit in unexpected ways—I got a fever after finishing a writing project, suddenly conscious of quiet traumas I thought I was addressing and wasn’t. I hold tighter to the people around me. I ache for my heart to feel warm and stumble on steady ground with the way it doesn’t.

Life is the same. Life has gone on. I’m different. But I recognize myself, and my life.

I realize that I am fortunate. The tragedies I’ve experienced are far from unusual, or overwhelming. They are common, familiar, in some ways inevitable griefs, part of being alive and having people to love. At the same time, they are not negligible. I am no more or less worthy of this grief and compassion than anyone else. It is a strange space to navigate, feeling so okay with such an ache in my heart.

It is nothing like I thought grief would be. And yet, I am still learning to recognize my own heartache, to permit it to take up the space it needs. There is no wrong way to grieve. Joy in the midst of loss is not a crime. We are alive, and we are allowed to waver—to laugh, to long, to forget we are sad. To feel sad, and forget why.

As much as I miss the people (and schnoodle) I have lost, I also miss that feeling of warm security—that warm-heart. The realization that loved ones can be lost changes something in you—however much it doesn’t strike the way you expect, feel the way you think it should. It is solid, certain ground gone from under your feet—and the lack of that warmth is a feeling I associate with the world we’re living in today as much as with my own personal losses.

I have responded to the world the same way I have to loss—I love harder. Hold on tighter. Waver longer. There is a grief and a compassion that belongs to each and every one of us and it is tragic and a blessing all at once.

I don’t know how to navigate this world any more than I ever knew how to navigate my grief. At no point did I feel, “ah, yes, got it, I know what this is now.” I don’t expect to, going forwards, either. But in the face of this uncertain future and a weariness where once my heart was warm, I think the same principles apply.

Life will go on. I will waver, and ache, and miss the days when my heart was warm with certainty and security and easy, unthinking comfort.

But I will also love harder. Hold on tighter. My family has pulled together more than it ever has, over this last year or two, and I am grateful for them every day. We are more brittle, some days, more worn down, but happy and here and loving. Steady. I don’t feel certain, but we don’t live in a world that allows for much certainty. We’re trying, trying so hard to do the best we can for ourselves and each other, and that’s all that really matters.

That’s all that really matters. We still have a future ahead of us, and I don’t need to be able to imagine what it’ll be like. I have people to love, and lots of practice trusting my own two legs on shifting ground, and that’s all the warmth I need.