I want what is gone to return and I will wait (everyone mourns differently)

I cannot remember crying a lot as a child because I did not have reasons to cry or because crying was not my way of getting attention.

However, I remember crying twice in SS3 (groundbreaking tears). The first was in front of my crush, who looked more confused than I did in pain — it is still a funny memory for me as I had never seen him lack words.

The second time was when my classmate and I had a misunderstanding that escalated into a standoff in front of the whole school. When my siblings walked into the house that afternoon and saw me crying, they dropped their school bags to sit with me on the bed.

Until today, the second guy I had an altercation with is described as “C that made you cry?”

At this point, I did not think I had an unpleasant relationship with tears or grief until I was overwhelmed and tearful one night in my final year as an undergraduate. Instead of my friend to comfort me, the silly girl started laughing like an Instagram model who got an engagement ring.

Why is my crying funny to you? Whilst laughing, she said she was just happy to know I could cry. Over the years, I have heard that from different people.

In my defense, I cry a lot when I need to cry. However, like every human, I grieve in all forms of ways.

Forty-eight hours after my father died, I started wishing I had been a young Mum because I was mourning the grandfather my kids would not meet. The implication was that I was talking about kids (even though I was not emotionally ready for them) a lot — it took me almost a year to realize that conversation was grief.

During my father’s burial, I slept off no less than seven/eight times that day alone. My sleep was my way of blocking out — I was mourning.

Words remind me of my father. This explained why I could not write any solid poems after the first two I wrote the week he died — my lack of words was a show of mourning.

I do cry — I cherish my ability to cry but I have also learned that I mourn in more ways than one. As a teenager, silence was the easiest way to identify how angry I was — I could be explaining and go mute…that’s the emotion and the self-control fighting.

Why am I writing this? Because you and I have been conditioned not to mourn or told to mourn in one specific way.

Why you have never grieved properly

Grief is a natural response to loss that many of us do not admit when we experience a loss. The loss of a loved one is easy to point at because it is physically seen. Yet, many of us have lost trust (intangible things) and not just relationships.

Trust is a foundational block upon which solid relationships are built. Therefore, if one relationship steals that block away, there is a tendency for another relationship to never come in — we thus lose this person and the next person we have not even met.

We chalk down these intangible losses as mundane. Yet, consistent missing blocks in our lives do not just equal lopsided relationships but lopsided perspectives — negative views of people, self-sabotaging behaviours, overcompensating in working relationships, fear of abandonment, fear of being seen as needy, and more, skewing the way we show up in life.

Here are reasons why you have likely not grieved properly

You did not admit that something was lost: regardless of how you trivialized what was lost, the vacuum showed and filling it required that you stretch yourself thinner than you used to.

Your inability to admit the vacuum meant you did not consciously find a replacement (your addiction might be your unconscious replacement).

Now, you feel drained but you cannot identify why you are that way— You are dragging a dead weight and acting like it’s living.

The people around you did not have the stamina for your grief: this is something most leaders have complained about a thousand times.

Until the calibre of people around you can succeed and fail with or at least hold you through it, you will always bear the weight of your losses without being able to grieve them.

You wanted to grieve in a certain way: there is no rule book for how to grieve, although there is a known process that people go through when grieving. It does not mean each of those processes looks the same way for everyone.

You think mourning is a show of weakness: mourning is what you do to show and relive the beauty that was once somewhere. Interestingly, it is also what you do to say goodbye to what used to be.

It is a known fact that families who have missing body cases do not heal easily because they have nothing to bury. Therefore, they are frustrated, resigned and hopeful — a different type of grief.

Refusing to mourn what is lost is an indirect way of saying “I want what is gone to return and I will wait here for it”. I doubt that is what you are yearning for — stagnancy.

You chose not to move on: you know the implication but you are choosing it. That is what you are doing when you keep all the gifts and items from that old relationship or keep an anniversary for the hurt etc — it is a deliberate attempt to hold on.

You fear moving on too fast and forgetting: while this thought is loyal, what it does to your life is not. If you loved whoever used to be in your life or appreciated whatever used to be in your life and have enough memories from having and holding, rest assured that your story will always be incomplete without them.

Permit yourself to grieve.

Men have been taught not to cry, women have been told men do not want cry babies, and children have simultaneously been told to grow up. Any angle you look at it, we have been forbidden from doing the barest minimum — mourning what is valuable to us.

Considering how much power repetition has on the mind, it is no wonder we cannot seem to toss out our fear of being caught in tears, weakness or grief.

Here are a few ways to give yourself permission

1. Think of it as clearing the cobwebs of the past
2. Think of how much you would love for this dark season to be over
3. Go over your happy memories and focus on the beauty
4. Remind yourself that person/thing is not coming back
5. Realize this will not go away in one day
6. Get a grief therapist if need be
7. Tell your circle the pain and deliberately ask to be taken care of
8. Enjoy the pockets of joyful experiences you have even in the middle of your hurt
9. Journal a lot
10. Cry yourself to sleep if need be (even if you have to do it when you are home alone)
11. Tears are just one way of expressing grief — you do not have to cry.