As I’m sitting on the bedroom floor, looking at my deceased aunt’s books, pictures and papers, i can’t shake the feeling that I shouldn’t be here. This is not my room and it shouldn’t be mine, but it is. These are now my books, my pieces of furniture and my plants that are just here as my aunt has left them.
This all seems too surreal to be the truth but unfortunately it is.
I’m not feeling devastated even though it’s been weeks since the news of my aunt’s death. I feel hollow, like a cardboard cut-out of a person and not a real human being. The paper is soggy, the cut-out is less than perfect, but here I am, sitting on a bedroom floor deciding what should stay and what should go.
Reality is brutal: I can’t keep everything. If it’s going to be my room I need to change it. Some books may stay, but most of the ones that are here - dictionaries older than me, with glued covers and yellow pages - need to go. I divide papers into two piles, „useful” and „useless”. The second pile is much larger than the first and I need more than two plastic bags to put all the scraps in. I put „useful” papers in a large paper container for my mother to look through later.
I can’t think about my aunt, who left this world way too early, who should have had more time, whose life shouldn’t end like this. I can’t think about her partially because I’m afraid I’ll end up a sobbing mess of a person and I just can’t afford that, not today. I also can’t think about her for a much more selfish reason: I can’t think about this situation and I don’t want to think about this situation. It’s too painful, too heart wrenching, it hits too close to almost all of my fears. Like somebody put all the things that I never thought I was scared of in a box and left for me to open, like a Pandora’s box.
Grieving, as I was told, is a process that takes time and steps, but who the hell thinks about those when a tragedy hits your family like a ton of bricks, taking all your breath away and earth under your feet with a one, long sweep? You don’t care about guidelines, you’re barely sane and at most of the time exhausted and tired and you want to be left the hell alone.
No, I don’t want to talk to you on Facebook about some trivial stuff, let me curl under a blanket and let me sleep for as long as it’s possible.
However, there are things that need to be taken care of. Documents to be filled, signatures to be given and other people to be consoled. The real world hits hard and it hits right where it hurts the most. The death of a loved one cannot be forgotten even for a moment.
Grieving, as it turns out, is not a one person problem to be solved over a big glass of wine. It’s a process that takes time, so much time that in some cases it may never end. It also takes more than one person, sometimes a whole family and most often a whole family including friends and coworkers.
Never in my life have I’ve been more thankful for friends. And not even my friends. The love that my family was showered with was unexpected and won’t be forgotten.
It might sound cliché, but love your friends. Make new friends. Renew contacts with people who might have forgotten you, but who you loved and treasured but lost sight of. You never know what might happen in the next hour or a week.
I believe that the love and good deeds you give come back to you in one way or another.
So go and do good.
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