“He was my North, my South, my East, and West…” From W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues” Growing up, I spent plenty of sleepless nights worri...
Today is National Grief Awareness Day. It’s a strange thing to me, to consolidate our collective empathy and consciousness towards something that is such a universal human experience to one day. But then again, maybe a day like today is needed because even though most of us have dealt with grief at one point in our lives, we like to compartmentalize it. We like to pretend we can continue through life unaffected and unhindered by the losses we’ve suffered.
“What you’re going through is hard.”
Six simple words I never heard.
In my heart, I begged for somebody
to acknowledge the loss.
Out loud, I told people close to me,
again and again, that I didn’t want to be cheered up.
"Just see me in pain and not
make it about you!" I wanted to scream.
But they couldn’t seem to hear me, and didn’t say the words I needed to hear.