Dear friend,

Grief is a really fucking weird thing and what I think people don't give enough credit or weight to is the idea that grief is ultimately personal. Like, really personal. And I don't mean, "oh, I'm the one affected by this" or "I'm the one who feels like this" personal, I mean that everyone experiences it in different ways and to an extent every grief one experiences is extremely unique on some level.

You never fully get used to people dying. I've held my best friend in my arms as he nearly died from an OD. I've had Sporklin die of aggressive ovarian cancer. I had one of the people I once loved most in the world die of suicide, possibly indirectly due to my actions. I'm no stranger to loss, and the weird part is all of this shit - all the pain and trauma and grief all those events caused or resurfaced - it was all very different.

Every one hit me in a different way. And I felt horrible about that sometimes. Why, for example, when my grandpa died, many years ago - did I feel nothing? While everyone around me was crying and feeling bad, I was simply comforting people and kinda moving on. It wasn't that I didn't care - the truth is many months or years later, I forget the exact timeline, I fucking broke. I experienced a very significant grief over it and finally felt what I "expected" to feel, to some extent, very powerful emotions. And that bothered me deeply, but it showed me what I'm trying to show you now.

It's that grief is personal. Personal on the deepest, truest level - and when an event like this occurs, it will hit you differently than it's ever hit anyone else who's ever lived. Sure, it might be 50% the same. 90% the same. 99.99% the same. But some part of it will be unique, and most of the time a grief - whether it's death, loss of a relationship, a job, whatever it was - will bother you on some level because of how you feel you "should" feel.

What I encourage you to remember at this time, and what I want you to take away from this ramble - is that however you react - however you feel, however it hurts or does not hurt - is just naturally how you're gonna feel about it. It's unique to you, it's okay to feel it or not feel it, it's okay to feel weird about it. Mixed feelings are okay. Pure fucking pain is okay. Relief can be okay, especially if the person was in pain.

It's personal. It's gonna hit you differently than it's ever hit anyone else. And that's okay.

Fuck anyone who tells you how to grieve.

Addendum: Anyways, it's almost rhetorical, point is - just be ready to feel, be ready not to feel and everything in between, look after yourself and remember you're loved by many - this particular fact (being loved by many) has never been untrue for anyone who knows other people, on some level, whether the best or worst of humanity, so it's going to be true for you - and that ultimately things will level themselves back out and make sense and feel okay no matter how this grief hits you.

this post was written in a flurry of thoughts, over the span of approximately four minutes, lightly edited and cleaned up for publication and shared with the permission of the friend who it was originally written for, with love and respect for those lost and the people left behind. if you are experiencing grief, know you’re not alone.