There you are. The beeping of machines. One beep for the heart, one for a med bag that needs to be refilled and one that you have no idea what it’s for, but it rings in perfect symphony with the medical equipment being used to keep your person alive. The sounds are the brass and the strings, a melding cacophony of notes playing to the current score of your life.

You want to scream with such vigor, that the echos of breath that shriek from your lungs penetrate the walls, with enough force to tear them down. You wish your back would sprout wings strong enough to carry you both away from this god-forsaken place. Or at the very least, if things aren’t looking up, that he would get his wings and fly toward heaven.

The wail that is rising up from your throat is so persistent that if you swallow it one more time, it may choke you. A large lump of grief, sitting and waiting. It waits for no one. Not the right moment, not the right place, not the right time. It will push its way through and you will find yourself red-faced and puffy-eyed in the middle of a crowded restaurant as the waiter is clumsily trying to ensure that you are okay while attempting to take your order. It happens to us all. The ones who have to find swift courage to face the Goliath of trauma and grief. We are the brave ones. With the most grit, with the most heart, with the most determination to make it out alive. We carry the stones in our pockets and attempt to throw them until our arms are numb, but the stones won’t throw.

“It worked for David, why won’t it work for me?” A question that will get no answer. You’ll pick up the direct line to heaven, over and over again, just to be met with the deafening silence of no dial tone. You were sure this thing worked before. Silence. A rest in-between the beats of the soundtrack of your life. Your arms are numb and your head is heavy and there they lay. They’re bodies looking like something out of a movie. A scene you never in a million years thought you’ be in. The director changed the script, you’ve got a different role now, but you found out on set with the rest of them. A job that you are not prepared for. You feel exposed and unsteady.

This is what it feels like to have someone you love so deeply, be so hurt. Hurt so badly that it requires hundreds of thousands of dollars spent at the hospital to get them well and even then, when they leave, they aren’t healed. This is how it feels to have tragedy hurled into your orbit, exploding so violently that the ones who feel the aftershock of the blast, are the ones who walk into the hospital well and leave broken and desperate for healing. Healing that cannot come in the form of a beeping machine or gauze covering your wounds. The broken mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, daughters and sons will not find healing through stitches. Nothing will stop the bleeding for them. We, the broken ones, will have to learn how to tend to our own wounds. Sometimes that looking like a tourniquet of denial, sometimes that looks like a heavy blanket of depression, moving more slowly through the world so you don’t rip it open again, all the while still facing the very thing that ripped you open.

It will never go away. The memories of the phone call you got that day. The desperation and pleading you did with god, to be met with a cold shoulder and a turned ear. You’ll never forget the hopelessness you felt. One day, you’ll get to the other side, where the intensity of those feelings has lessened, but you never forget. Losing someone, experiencing their loss in such a traumatic way, is a wound so deep it will take years to scar over and even then, it will always be tender to the touch, and you can’t ever predict what is going to find it, or when it will happen. And then, you’ll find yourself red-faced and puffy-eyed in the middle of a crowded place, again.

Know you are never too far from happening upon someone else who understands.

Grief is a giant.

A giant bitch.

xo,

Shea