Finding My Humanity Through Grief
CW: Mention of Suicide
To be human is to grieve, in the strangest ways possible. Every day we wake up one day closer to our inevitable demise. We all know it’s coming. It can’t be avoided. It’s one of the few experiences every person goes through. Rich, poor, smart, dumb — it doesn’t matter. It never matters. Death doesn’t pick favorites. It always seems to come as a shock, despite death being the only thing guaranteed in life.
Death sucks, to put it simply. And I’m not here to tell you it shouldn’t — it should. Four years ago, I lost one of my closest friends to suicide. He was 16. I’d experienced family deaths before that, unlike many of my friends, but none of them hurt like his did. It’s still a hard concept for me to process years later. I blamed myself, blamed him, blamed God, when in reality there is really no one to blame. It would be selfish of me to think that I could’ve been the one to save him. I’m not some magical healer. I can’t fix every problem. Mental illness creeps itself into all our lives, and all too often is so much more powerful than us, no matter how hard we try.
Losing him was pain I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. At 16, you should be exploring the world with your friends, plotting the next time you’re going to steal some of your parents’ vodka from the liquor cabinet for the woods party happening next weekend. Time continues to pass, years go by. I’m almost 20. But death is a funny thing, because all he’ll ever get to be is 16.
At the ripe age of 15, I thought I was invincible, as many high schoolers do. I brushed off emotions like they meant nothing. I refused to let a little heartbreak get in my way, thinking that having emotions meant I was weak.
And then the reality check came. It was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I was off from school, tired from a busy weekend filled with Sweet Sixteens. I grouchily agreed to stop at CVS with my mom before our shopping endeavors. My phone rang and I picked it up without hesitation, as I normally would when my best friend called. She could barely get a word out. We had just finished midterms, so, in all honesty, my initial thoughts were, “Ah grades must’ve been posted.” But then I heard it. She was saying his name. My heart sank. She didn’t even need to get all the words out; I knew exactly what she was trying to tell me.
The second I understood what she was telling me I started laughing. Uncontrollably. Not because it was funny (it was faaaar from it), but because I had no idea what all these emotions were that I was feeling. I couldn’t place what the feeling of immediate darkness was running through my body. I couldn’t process my heart breaking as she continued sobbing over the phone. I didn’t know what it was. I never let myself feel it before. I felt like I was being tickled from all directions without end. I had deprived myself of my own humanity for so long, emotions felt hilarious.
Every death I hear about brings me back to this exact moment — when I realized that, despite how hard I might’ve tried to avoid it, I was only human. It hurts realizing that you’re really just like everyone else, but that’s the beauty of it all. Death forces you to feel it all, whether you want to or not. My advice is to let it. Refuse to believe it at first. Beg the universe for one last day. Tell God you’ll actually start that essay due next week if He brings them back. Get angry. Throw things. Punch a wall or two. Cry for hours on end. Oversleep your alarm. Lie to your boss and tell him you’re sick just to get a day off. Feel it. Feel it all without regret. Let it make you human. Grief always makes you human.
