“Let’s not romanticize grief. It is a ghost parade. Sleep doesn’t come. Only reckoning.” Rainier Wylde
By: Gabriela Yareliz
Grief can stem from so many things or circumstances. It is often tied to death, but it can be tied to addiction, abandonment, loss of time, betrayal, not being understood or loved, and the loss of a life that was possible. Grief is a complicated thing we often can’t name. It can also hit you like a tidal wave when you least expect it to.
I was thinking a lot about grief this week. I think it was sort of front-of-mind with the moving Dedication Night on Dancing with the Stars. A night where vulnerability reigned, and some dark moments were showcased as resilience and complicated circumstances turned into pivotal moments underscored by love.
Rainier Wylde wrote a piece on grief that I related to, Ghosts on Parade. He writes: “[Grief] keeps arriving in steady waves, prowling around the door at ungodly hours, tearing through your chest as if the ribs were made out of confetti.”
The more we fight grief, the more it attacks to subdue. Wylde writes, “Let the monsters finish their feast.” And then, when you stop holding it in and trying to repress it, things become “not easier but bearable. And somehow, in its own terrible way, that change(s) everything.”
Wylde wisely writes that “Control is an illusion. Closure is a myth. What we have is the practice of opening, again and again, to what hurts. And when we allow the rains or the dragons to come, we discover the storm is survivable, the fire is livable, and more than that, it clears the air. There is only the possibility for joy is in the present moment. That’s where the real magic is.”
That is what transforms us— the fires and hurricanes we survive. The act of survival leaves you a different person, a stronger person. It’s the seal on the wound that makes a scar.
Wylde continues writing, “We are experts at disappointment.” But then, there is gratitude. The ultimate rebellion in the midst of grief.
“Gratitude has never been polite. You won’t find the grit of it on a Hallmark card or a cheery Instagram caption. It’s feral. It’s wild. It’s a person at the end of their rope who still marvels at the smell of rain in the heat of the day. It’s someone who has lost everything and yet stops to taste a warm tomato. It’s learning to slow down long enough to catch the shimmer of ordinary life before it passes you by. Gratitude is choosing to name these moments as sacred, as enough, even when the world insists it’s still lacking,” Wylde writes.
No matter what you have been through or what you have lost, or what you are currently losing or braving, the question becomes—Will you dare to allow grief to cleanse you? Will you rebel and find the gratitude in the everyday sacred?
I conclude with Wylde’s beautiful words on gratitude—
“Gratitude is, in the end, an impolite refusal. Refusing to be drowned by despair, or bent by bitterness or keep playing the tired game of excuses and blame. It is the rude, beautiful insistence that we our ragged, ordinary, half broken life is still astonishing.”
Embrace the “impolite refusal” and “beautiful insistence.” It’s where we find the resilience, strength, joy and magic of life as the waves cleanse our souls with tears.
GABRIELA YARELIZ 