The year 2020 brought along many challenges and unfortunately some of us experienced grief last year. Of course people deal with grief all of the time, but with the pandemic and some of the giants that were lost, last year simply hit a little different. Grief could be felt around the world collectively.

With March being right around the corner I wanted to reflect on some of my personal experience with grief this year and share what has kept me grounded and what I’m doing to move forward.

March 1st of 2020 I experienced what has probably been the most heartbreaking event of my adult years so far. My grandmother suddenly transitioned after battling with a rare sickness for a little over a few months. She did not have Covid, but interestingly enough the world literally shut down within a week after she passed.

This wasn’t something that my family nor I was expecting. I come from a family of great faith so I was sure that my grandmother would make it through her ordeal. I’ll be honest and say that I didn’t know exactly how serious her condition was until closer towards the end.

With the first anniversary of her passing on the horizon, I’ve been slowing down a bit to prepare myself for the feelings that this day will bring. I’m no stranger to significant grief. My mother died when I was 6. Losing my grandmother was losing my mother all over again especially because of the relationship that we had due to her raising me.

One thing about grief is that there isn’t an expiration date on it.

The year mark is approaching and I have done significant work on dealing with the grief and yet I still feel and know that I have so much more to work on in regards to handling her passing. The effects of grief can also be unpredictable as well. One day you can feel good and feel as though you’re moving forward in your life and then the next day you can see a commercial, or smell a food that reminds you of that person and can find yourself crying for the whole day.

No one can tell you how to grieve.

It can look different for everyone, even if you’re connected to same person that passed. There’s no one way to grieve. What matters most is that you take the time to properly grieve, however long or how ever many times you need to. I say times because in my previous experience, while my mother passed when I was 6, I don’t feel like I properly started to grieve her until I was 21. And then at almost every milestone I experienced there after, there would come a moment of feeling that grief out of pure desire of her seeing me at these moments (like becoming a wife or mother).

Because we spent the whole year in lockdown, I was able to sit in the isolation I needed to help me through. I turned to meditation heavy and leveled up my self care routines and spiritual journey. It really helped me process what I was feeling and all of the challenges that arise when you lose someone so close. It also allowed space for me communicate with God as I had many questions to ask. Growing up in religion you hear often to not question God. But from my personal experience, God never “because I said so” my questions. I would often start my meditation off with asking a question and would sit in the silence, not forcing any answer to me or not trying to make up an answer in my head. After meditating I would immediately journal, and surprisingly enough, I would find that many of the answers I was looking for would appear.

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You can’t rush healing. You can only show up for it.

And I also had to allow myself to want to be healed. There were many days that my conscious mind would feel like I wasn’t able to handle the grief. And then my subconscious mind would take over and remind me gently, “you are equipped”. I’m so thankful of the self-care journey and practices that I have become so familiar with because without doubt I would be in a different place without them.

I found ways to memorialize my grandmother throughout my everyday life. My grandmother loved to cook and watch her family eat and so every time I cook for my family now, I intentionally try to channel the love that she put into her cooking and caring for her family deeply. I wrote a blog about how I cooked some of my favorite recipes from her over the holidays as well to keep her a part of the new family traditions that we were building.

Therapy also played a critical role in my healing. Therapy is sort of trending now and I know that sometimes when things become trendy they can sort of lose their depth. But therapy taught me some new tools and also allowed me to talk through a lot of what I was feeling instead of feeling like I was burdening my family and friends with all that I was dealing with.

It was so important to me to keep living because I have a family to continue to live for. It can become so easy to feel like you’re just existing when someone so close to you passes away. The last thing I wanted was for my family to feel like they loss me as well. I had to really practice and lean into being present in the moment for my family.

It’s not something that I can say that I’ve completely healed from, however I am proud of myself for my current position in dealing with the grief. Losing my grandmother is something that I thought I would never be able to handle well. And when she slipped out of my reality, I immediately felt like the pain would be too heavy for me carry. But I took it one day at a time, and I’m honestly still taking it a day at a time. This is one of the reasons why I advocate for self-care so much because in these unexpected moments, the work that you do in taking care of yourself will serve as tools to help you recenter in who you are and even in your faith.

You cannot suppress grief. No matter how hard you try, it will find a way to seep out because it’s too much to keep in. Allow yourself to feel what you feel. Confront the feeling and deal with it. Trying to suppress grief can lead to triggers developing for you as well as other emotional imbalances that will follow you and present itself until you finally decide to deal with it.

As we approach the year anniversaries and are reminded of some of the tragedy that was 2020, my hope is that we all are able to ground ourselves in who we are and to remember the love of our loved one rather than just the agony of their loss. I hope we all save space for our feelings and do the necessary work to handle the grief. I especially hope that we all find ways to extend grace to ourselves as we heal and realize that one day, even if it’s not particularly today, we will all be ok.

Thanks for reading!