Grief

I love her.

We’re over.
It hurts.

The End.

This is what I find myself having to tell my friends. They are very supportive and understand what the end of this relationship means for me. They are afraid that I will break down and have to cancel my MCAT….again. 

I am forever grateful for my friends. Truly.
But I realized that over the course of this year, I have finally begun learning what grief is and learning how to mourn, and all of those things have prepared me for this moment. 

The most important thing I have learned about mourning and grief is that you have to let it happen, and not work too hard to get over it, or to stay in it. Grief will come in waves, one moment you will be submerged, then the next it will pull back. Don’t wait and look for the submersion, don’t fear that the pulling back of the waves means that the grief is over and you weren’t actually hurt, and don’t hate yourself when the wave comes again because you thought it was over. 

Us being over hurts, it is painful, but it doesn’t hurt like hell. A part of me is tempted to think that that means that she never mattered to me, but thats not true. I have been mourning her since August. For two months I couldn’t eat, sleep, breathe, my chest was under constant compression and I longed for death. 

Though we tried to make it work, this goodbye is the acceptance part of that grief process that it’s over. Do I cry? Of course. It still hurts very badly. But i’m not in the eye of a storm where I never have moments to gasp for air. So when the wave comes over me, I cry and acknowledge it’s presence, then when it starts to recede I welcome that too and try to find ways to move forward. 

Mourning may be painful, but it’s freeing.