A Grief Catch Up & A Brief Catch Up

yes, i'm still alive and yes this substack is still alive

A Grief Catch Up

And boy, does it—catch up to us, that is.

I’m making my return to this substack with something a lotta heavier, something I needed to write for myself, before we get to the “hi, hello, how are you” kind of stuff (It’s at the end of the post, I promise). If that’s more your speed, or what you have the capacity for at this very moment, feel free to skip to the end for A Brief Catch Up TM.

TW: death, grief, loss, suicide

This piece has been harder for me to write than I expected, and most likely why it’s taken me a minute. It’s not been hard piece to write. Not in a “I don’t want to feel these feelings” kind of way, but in a “I’m not sure I have the words to describe this very new thing I’m feeling” kind of way.

In 2020, I lost one of my very best friends five years ago. Jesus fucking Christ, has it already been five years?! She took her life, and despite already having faced very painful, very-adult-seeming challenges/losses, this one became, perhaps, the most traumatic thing that’s ever happened to me.

Everything about it that was awful and unimaginable: the often violent nature of suicide, the political climate of 2020, and the fact that she had moved into my apartment complex, unknowingly making me the closest person in proximity and in relationship to her when she died.

I re-read the words I wrote last year around her death date in preparation of writing this piece. It was the first year since she died that I hadn’t felt entirely consumed by the painful reminder that she was gone, and I was still here. To describe its dull nature, I wrote:

“This year, the sadness that usually swallows me whole, feels like it’s just on the other side of the door. I can barely hear it through the cladded layers of wood, and it’s just out of reach as it whispers to me that a familiar kind of pain is waiting for me on the other side.”

Last year, my grief took the shape of a transient visitor, just passing through town, on its way to somewhere else. This year it showed up on my doorstep with a greater need to be acknowledge; it moved in with me, carved out space by way of choosing a room to call its own, and demanded to be put back on the lease.

So you could say that this year it swallowed me whole.

I’ve made a lot of changes since I started this substack and it’s funny to reflect on how significantly different my life looks now. While in my office job days, I hadn’t exactly been happy, I had more space to grieve. I had PTO. I had time to sit down. I had room to breathe. But these days, I run on way-too-much caffeine and an undercurrent of urgency, and when at the end of the day when I leave the restaurant, I’m exhausted but satisfied. This year, it didn’t take much time after crossing the finish line that is my work week, for the feelings to rush in, flooding me with overwhelm and the kind of anguish that I absolutely did NOT want to deal with. As tears spilled out of my eyes, I wiped them away with fervor, as if I could stop the ginormous wave of grief that was coming for me, from crashing into the rest of the sea.

Two days later, I found myself pulling my last batch of pasta with uncontrollable tears in my eyes, a glaring reminder that:

Well, fuck. I guess I need to feel this shit.

Begrudgingly, I went home and let myself fall apart—let every single ounce of pain spill out of me in what I can only call an emotional exorcism (yo, grief is so intense WTF).

The past four years I’ve grieved for her: all the unanswered questions, a life that she’d never get to live, the deep and confusing pain of losing her.

But this year, not only was the intensity of my grief different, but the nature of my grief was different. I’ve been sitting with this for the last three weeks now, and its managed to linger—something that’s come as a huge surprise to me. I’ll let go and surrender to the feeling that’s asking to me to be felt. I’ll let myself be sad, let myself cry, and yet it comes back around—sits as a pit in my stomach as if I haven’t acknowledged everything it’s begging to tell me.

“You’re missing something,” it whispers to me, its whisper growing louder and louder till its a scream.

And to be fair, there’s been a lot of emotional suppression involved that I’m sure has played a part in my lingering grief. I’m not exactly proud of, but can forgive myself for because life’s too short to be a dick to yourself like that. A day after My Emotional Exorcism TM, I journeyed home for my sister’s medical school graduation, plastered the best smile I could muster up on my face, and told myself the show must go on. Pushing myself to hold it together all while balancing family dynamics was, of course, not what the doctor ordered, but timing is funny like that and I am glad that I got to see her graduate despite being severely depressed.

But it’s a tale as old as time: the body keeps the score (has it tried not?!) and my unacknowledged emotions became physical symptoms, meaning I had tummy issues all through the trip and the following weeks after. I think it’s started to finally normalize, please god.

Growing more and more impatient my body kept reminding me:

You’re missing something. You’re missing something. You’re missing something.

And it’s taken me some time to realize that the thing I’ve been missing is me.

This year’s anniversary has brought a new layer of my grief into the fold, reminding me of how complex suicide loss really is. In the past years I’ve grieved her, and this year, in addition to her death, I think I’m grieving mine.

No, I’m not a ghost, writing this piece!

I’ve always known that I lost so much of myself that year—that a part of me died with her—and this year, I’m having to feel it, in a lot of ways, for the very first time. It sucks, thanks for asking. I was twenty-five when she died, just a few weeks shy of my twenty-sixth birthday, and the weight that I learned to carry—for our friends, for her parents, and almost even for myself—is something forced me to grow up in ways that I wasn’t ready for.

And maybe in way that I shouldn’t have had to.

Overnight, I became the press secretary and operations manager of my friend’s death, and this year, I’ve had to face the impact that it’s had on me.

Twenty-five and learning how to make the phone call that says, “Hey, our friend died and I just wanted you to know.”

Twenty-five and on the phone with her mother the very next day, trying to figure out what we were going to do with her cat.

Twenty-five and planning a memorial dinner.

Someone who had gone through a similar loss years before had told me: “You know, you might be glad that you were able to do that for them—you know, down the line.” And I’ve been waiting to feel that way, but the feeling’s never come. I think this year I’m beginning to make peace with the fact that that feeling will probably never come.

I’m not sure why I did those things. I didn’t feel like ‘no’ was the right thing to say, so it became a ‘yes,’ but in retrospect, ‘yes’ was simultaneously the right thing to do for her but perhaps the wrong thing for me. I don’t blame anyone (despite how angry I feel sometimes), and frankly, I don’t even blame myself for agreeing. It was an unimaginable situation where, there wasn’t really any kind of right answer.

So as I write this, five years and some change later, contemplating what’s felt like an unshakeable grieving period, I know that I’m grieving the parts of myself that I’ll never get back—the parts of myself that died with her. It’s taken me five years to understand, or at least to really let myself feel, the grief of my own loss of innocence.

It’s poetic and rude, really: I lost myself too when she died. I lost who Jennie was then, not just because she died, but because a new Jennie had to be born who could carry this weight and who could do the things that needed to be done after.

Losing someone to suicide is… corrosive. It splintered me into pieces, destroyed me from the inside out, and shattered the way that I viewed the world. Nothing made sense, and it felt like nothing could ever make sense ever again. And there I was, a zombie, walking around in the land of the living, like I’d never know how to speak their language. And in the cracks of my fractured pieces, I was confronted with my shadow side: the hurt parts of me that wanted to make everyone hurt as much as I did.

For a long time, my only goal was to survive, to function, and to fake it just enough to keep my job and pay my bills.

But surviving is not living, and someday, I’d have to live again.

And I did. I have. And it’s been painful and beautiful and wonderful and… alive.

Over the last few years, I’ve had to rebuild myself. I’ve super glued pieces back together, discovered new ones that I’ve grown all by myself, and made a home for my darker, older parts to rest, to know they can be soft, to know that they don’t have to work so hard to protect me.

It doesn’t mean they’re not still incredibly jarring to experience when I’m confronted by them again, because they are.

And overtime, just like my grief, I’ve taken on a new form: I’m softer now, I have a deeper empathy for myself and for other people, I’ve learned how to stand up for myself, and I feel so much more at home within myself. This also, I suppose comes with time and age, and yes, I’m just finishing my Saturn Return, so there’s that too.

But none of this has come for free either.

In this after, I’ve shed so many old layers, made new friends, allowed myself to be loved by new faces and gone deeper with old ones. It’s the strangest feeling: there are more people in my life now that don’t know what happened, that don’t know how hard I had to fight to get here, that never knew me in that chapter of my life. I think in some ways this year, I’ve struggled a lot with letting these parts of me be known with the fairly newer folks in my life and the ones that… well, didn’t know about this until now. (If this is you, hi!)

Sometimes it’s terrifying to let yourself be truly known, especially the less savory parts of yourself, and I’m still working on this.

I’ve even struggled with wanting to reconnect with these parts of me. It’s painful. Like, wouldn’t it just be cool if I could grieve her death and not have to grieve what I lost in the (metaphorical) fire? But I suppose the layers of this grief will just continue to unfold over the years, so I hope this metaphorical grief backpack has expansion features… or at least extra pockets.

I read something the other day that said something along the lines of: “Grief never goes away. We just learn to carry it.” This year, I’ve felt the weight of something new—a new layer and new shades of my grief. I’m making it sound nice. It’s not nice. Not at all. Some days I’m really tired, and the grief backpack feels too fucking heavy. Sometimes I want to throw it down on the ground and leave it behind and never have to deal with it ever again. Sometimes I wish I never had to carry it in the first place.

But I remind myself that, year after year, I always do: I adapt, I change with it, I learn how to carry it. And I’m incredibly lucky that I have people in my life who can help me carry it when I get too tired: who have an metaphorical extra room when I just need a place to metaphorically stay the night on this metaphorical hike that I didn’t ask to be on in the first place.

I hope that writing this piece frees me, helps me carry the weight too, lightens the load even just a little bit. Grief is hard, and the most fucked up thing about it is that the only way to find relief is to feel it all (aka the literal opposite of what any of us want to do). I don’t really have a conclusion to offer, and I certainly don’t have any fucking answers, but I suppose what I do have is just a little extra resilience than I did yesterday and a little extra grace for myself.

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A Brief Catch Up

• I’m still making pasta! Just at a different job. And I’m doing the thing I said I never wanted to do which is work in a restaurant. But my god, what a gift it is to feel so belonged and loved in a place I spend 40 hours a week in.

• I started a digital literary magazine called FLOAT + FLOW with two wonderful and incredibly talented creatives, Sydney Greene and Michelle Kao. If you’re not subscribed, go subscribe!!

• I did a May Baked Beans Box and it was lovely. If you purchased one, thank you so much for your support.

• George & Beans are still spoiled as shit and I love them so much.