GRIEF is best described as floating along a river.
Somedays you are gently gliding along peaceful waters and other days you find yourself being tossed about in raging rapids, struggling to keep your head above water.
Unfortunately, grief is an emotion I have become far too familiar with this year. Month after month I have said goodbye to friends and family. I have attended more virtual funerals than I want to admit. I have shed a decade worth of tears.
I find myself digging into my memory to capture the voices, the laughter, the smell, anything that reconnects me with the person I lost. I live with an ever pressing fear that one day I will wake up and not be able to conjure up those memories.
I lost an uncle this week, and daily I have been replaying him calling my name for fear that I forget.
The sadness comes and goes, but the feeling of loss lingers.
The feeling of grief is not one that is only felt at the loss of a person. Any loss in our lives, be it a person, place or thing, can be a source of grief.
Right now, as a nation, I think it is safe to say we are in a period of collective grief.
Over the past year-and-a-half, we have all lost.
We mourn the loss of our carefree pre-pandemic days. Some ache for loss of their jobs, their ability to move freely, to socialise. My children and all other children, mourn their school friends, their lives outside of their homes.
The feeling of hope is something many of us grieve for. The chance that tomorrow will bring a new positive change. With the loss of this hope I fear that we have descended into anger.
With our collective grief, our loss of hope we seethe in our collective rage. We see it every day; we feel it every day, because we are fed up. We feel as though we have lost control of many aspects of our lives and we have turned that anger onto one another.
We rage at our Government, our leaders, our national brothers and sisters that we believe are holding us back.
Unfortunately, in doing so we descend further into our sadness, and our hopelessness.
Grief in its most basic form is a type of emotional trauma. It affects how we perceive the world around us and how we behave.
If we look at the protests, the skepticism and anger meted out online and in the halls of the Red House, it is obvious we are nation traumatised.
Our first step to healing is recognising this trauma. We do not have to accept what we do not believe in or what we believe is unfair, but we need to acknowledge our pain.
From that acknowledgement comes clarity as to how to pave a new way forward. When we dwell on the dark, we fail to see the light. When we focus on blame, we cannot focus on our own responsibilities and abilities to create a better way ahead.
Grief is weird. I am personally not a fan and I am rather tired of being caught in its current.
As this nightmare of a year progresses, all I can manage to do is try to keep my head above water, strain my eyes and keep a look out for any tiny glimmer of hope that may be on the horizon.
Grief never leaves us, but we move forward, we carry on.
I agree fully with your commentary but there is more I think that motivates us to move forward. We need to see a path and know where we are going and the destination needs to be favorable. The trouble is that there is a sense of a very slow movement forward that’s not particularly colorful. We need our leaders to be more people centred, more inclusive and having listened to our grief and hopes build a bright future with us. That is not happening. The most creative and innovative people are needed now to design the paths however we have hardly sought them out and given them the means to facilitate design thinking that would deal with challenges and move us forward. It’s more of the same. The mundane. The historical drivers. That’s not good enough so here we are. Is anybody listening?
Well written .