Grief- it feels like an anomaly, but it's a natural response.

Grief

 

Heaviness, Hand drawn digitised, 2025.

‘Heaviness holds you low,

Clutching and gnawing at you

Like a creature that just wont

Let go’

 

Let's be honest grief is reserved for certain moments within life for death of a loved one, a diagnosis such as cancer, a marriage break down or for older people remembering their fit young selves. But there are many times throughout a person’s life that they experience grief.

 

There is a period of grief when those life events happen, we allow those humans to grieve. We hold space for them at the start but eventually that emotional space becomes annoying to people, as grief apparently has a timeline of how much another human can endure and be around it. The timeline of grief isn't set by the individual experiencing it; how can it? However, society puts a time limit on how much they can endure of the other person so eventually they become quiet about their grief not to alienate their friends and family; they keep it hidden and smaller. Those are society’s standards on grief, but we feel it in many other settings.

 

 It's quite an odd feeling to feel grief when we aren't supposed to, not within those reserved life events. Sudden disability comes with a big storm of grief, even if we aren't aware of it just yet it is there waiting for us to feel and acknowledge it. We may feel that we don't have grief within us, but then looking at old photos of before sudden disability, the mind remembering when you could fill a day up with productive activities. We once had careers a social life and now we have to muster all the energy we can to walk to the toilet. Grief will shake your mental health to its core; it feels heavy and dense, thick and weighted. Sadness, irritability, anger, rage all of these emotions we can stem back to the core feeling grief.

 

 We may avoid people or places that remind us of our former selves, shut down in our own personal lives. We may feel that disability is now at the forefront of ourselves, all consuming. We are now not human we are grief and disability intertwined. People around us may not understand it as we are still alive, however there is a death; the death of the former self. We may feel we shouldn't grieve who we once were and be grateful that we are still alive, we may try to avoid it and stuff it down but there is no running away from grief. Grief will show up in your behaviours and in your mental space, we often fear feeling grief. But it's a part of the natural process.

 

 The beautiful thing about grief is the process of it, to be strong to stare grief in the eyes, sit with it and feel it in its entirety to flow with it and allowing it to be. If we learn to work with grief we will learn many wise things that our identities aren't wrapped up into our careers, social status, our abilities and how much we can endure. Sudden disability and grief dance and strip away all of these things we think we are and humbles us knowing that we aren't really that individual as we think we are and had created; an illusion of the self. Our careers, social status and our abilities to do such as sports are just things we do rather it being who we are at its core. It shows us the raw humanness we are and how we are really just a vessel of energy.

 

With grief comes healing and a deeper insight if we allow it, and it doesn't have a timeline we may sit with our grief for six months and think it's finished. But then to our surprise it visits us again in the present moment connected to something, we must greet it in and say hello and let it do its dance again.

 

Grief at the start had me jealous of others abilities, people around me could run and move without struggle; it almost turned me bitter. However, working with grief I'm now in awe of the human body and i view others in amazement rather than in vain. I love seeing people running, moving with such smoothness and often voice it when I see it. And that is a part of the process we shouldn't feel bad for feeling jealousy, sadness, anger we should feel it all.

 

We end up turning our experience with grief into deeper self-knowledge, into art, into healing and self-care, into learning and exploration or we can just sit beside it and let it be and allow it to be our biggest teachers. Society’s expectations can take a seat, I do not care of how others perceive it, I do not work with societies accepted timelines of grief and seeing it as a negative thing because I see the power within the process of grief. It is a natural human experience and feeling whilst it is quite hard to sit with it in the beginning it is a natural process of sudden disability.

 

Grief for myself can prop up in the most random of times in the beginning it was more present. I remember my partner wanted to take us to the local playground. I sat in my wheelchair and watched my family run around, I was overwhelmed with feelings of grief and I quietly cried. Now it just greets me every so often and instead of trying to stuff it down I sit with it and listen to what it’s trying to teach me. At times it’s telling me to stop doing and actually rest a nice reminder that,

 ‘doing doesn’t equate ones worth, rest.’   

 

‘Grieving your own life,

Only some would ever know,

So heavy and hard’

Ghost of the Former Self, Hand drawn digitised, 2023.