For most of my life, grief has been a foreign concept – something I’ve only understood from the outside looking in.

In the fourth grade, my parents took me to an open casket funeral. I’m not sure who the deceased was to us. A great grandparent, perhaps? Maybe an uncle? I had never met him in life, but I met him there in the soft warm light of the church as people shuffled along in a solemn, black line. Some stopped to touch him, others quietly dabbed at their tears. He didn’t look dead – he looked at peace, simply resting, in an eloquent suit inside of a shiny wooden box.

To me, grief meant mourning the death of a loved one – something I’d never actually had to do myself. I’d seen the weighty fog that surrounded people as they spoke of loved ones lost, the peculiar question of how and when a person departs and most importantly why. The unanswerable truth of God’s plan always hanging over, less a comfort than a looming presence.

But grief is not just about death, it’s about loss – sorrow, anguish, heartache. And worse, still, the finality of it all; acknowledging that what could have been will never be. It’s that pit in your stomach, the feeling of circling the drain as you realize you can’t turn back time. Grief is facing the cold and cruel reality we try so hard to subdue – one that often comes at an intimately personal loss.

Everybody feels the weight of loss… missed opportunities, broken relationships, tough experiences… I had lost pieces of my childhood to abuse, and many more pieces of my life to depression and anxiety. But eventually I realized those weren’t the broken pieces I was truly mourning; it was everything I’d lost because of them.

Bliss, peace, direction. I was wandering aimlessly through life and waiting for a big light-up sign to say “this way!”

I first acknowledged grief when I started to write about it. I learned to journal effectively, in a way that pierced through the walls I’d built around my heart without bleeding me dry. Placing pen to paper gave an identity to my sorrows, it gave them a voice and a purpose and perhaps even a gentle power. I thought I was healing, in my own time, when the world pandemic suddenly broke out and we all descended into lockdown.

In March of 2020, I was twenty-three years old and living onsite at my workplace as a missionary for a bible camp. I’d also recently broken up with my first boyfriend, relapsed into alcoholism, and was casually tossing around the idea of driving directly into a tree.

And then the plague hit.

Most of my co-workers were laid off.

My horse died.

I got a puppy (thank God).

Time stood still. I spent every day alone, working in total silence. I used to love the quiet, dewy mornings of feeding horses and morning chores. I loved the sweet smell of hay and the warmth of their breath against the cool morning air. Work had always been a welcome distraction for me; but now, it was no different from the weighty darkness that awaited me at home each night.

Being left alone with my grief, I was sharply reminded that I was not at all on the right track for a twenty-something girl. High school dropout, no college, minimal savings. My friends were buying houses. They had actual children. You’d want to be able to look back on those years and say “Yeah, but at least I was happy and doing what I loved to do!”

L-O-L

No.

I wasn’t happy. I was spiraling – depressed over a shadow in my soul I could never fully identify. I was brooding and crushed and every day was a cage I desperately tried to escape. I attended solemn staff meetings seated in a circle, spaced ten feet away from everyone around me. We shouted shallow compliments on each other’s colourful cloth masks and prayed for rejuvenation to the world. I listened bitterly to the cheery remarks about the benefits of lockdown – family movie nights, board games, time spent together hiking and canoeing and gardening. I struggled to reconcile with them when all I could see was the black hole in front of me.

Those same meetings held other grievances, too. Another friend on a ventilator. A mother, a father. Another death. Another Zoom invite to a funeral. More restrictions, more rules, more sickness, more fear. More toxic positivity, more family gatherings.

More tension, more tequila, more nights viscerally sobbing on the bathroom floor until the silence took over.

That summer I came to see grief as a more universally understood term, and for the first time in my life I allowed myself to mourn for all the losses – big and small – that had compiled in my heart until it became too heavy to bear. My journal entries became erratic and seemingly shallow. I wrote about dropping out of high school, about my break-up, about friendships long lost. I cried over the mundane and miniscule, bled it all out on the paper before me, and when I was done I found myself too exhausted to do anything more than sleep.

My grief had a name, now. It existed in every moment of the day – in the quiet wondering of what could have, or should have been.

I quietly took six weeks of leave from my job. My fast-growing puppy, Huxley, slept sprawled across the bench seat of our truck as we left coastal British Columbia and headed east – through the mountain tops and across the yellow prairies – all the while processing my grief, replaying conversations in my head, and often stopping to weep on the side of the road. I sobered up entirely, feeling the true weight of it all for the first time in a very long time.

I drove until we reached the shores of Lake Superior, jerking the wheel last minute when I saw the stormy beach open up behind a line of trees. Huxley perked up as the truck lurched into park, and together we sprinted along the deep sandy shores. The heavy clouds erupted into a thunderous downpour, the white caps of the waves lively and bright and real. The cold seeped into my bones, sand gritty in my shoes, and the broad horizon before me the first sight of freedom I’d seen in a long, long time.

I was alive, and I was here, and this was now.

A few days later we parked next to my childhood church and I allowed myself to exist in the memories of the abuse that happened inside. I didn’t try to push them away, nor did I try to make any sense of them. Instead, I just stayed there in the moment. Huxley laid his head in my lap, the warmth of his breathing and the soft touch of his fur grounding me in light. And then we drove away – as quietly as we’d appeared, albeit a little heavier.

It wasn’t at all surprising that when our trip came to an end and we returned to the coast, my grief met me the moment I opened my front door. That’s the thing about grief – it doesn’t really end. Whether you’re mourning the loss of a loved one or an alternative life completely unknown to you, grief will always linger in the spaces between.

But I did stay sober. The subtle realizations I’d had on my journey stuck with me every day, seeping into my life, and I did not reject them. A few more months and lockdown started to open up some. New co-workers came, one of whom would later become my best friend. She was a wonderful person with her own layers of grief, a topic we never really acknowledged but have gently bonded over for many years now.

The days still come in ups and downs, ebbs and flows… but something inside of me has learned to cope with life again.

The hard truth is, nobody talks about the grief of your twenties – the moments between then and now, of finding yourself in a world that may or may not ever offer its approval. Nobody tells you how lonely it can be to experience that part of your life without any real sense of knowing. The changing of jobs and schools, the pressure to settle on a career – to settle down, period. The pressure of watching everyone around you seeming to move with just a little more purpose, a little more passion, and a little more expertise. The pressure of faith, if you have it – and the pressure to be grateful even when you are not.

Grief does not mean shutting out all the light in your life. It doesn’t mean eradicating the beauty around you or choosing only to exist in sadness. It simply means making room for the things that have hurt us – allowing that pain to ease in and fill the space we’ve set aside for it. It means feeling without judgement or reprimand, without shame or embarrassment – feeling unapologetically. Simply… acknowledgement.

Grieving looks different for everyone; the journey to mourn does not come easily or lightly.

But you’re alive, and you’re here, and this is now.