12 years

It is April 24th, 2023. It has been exactly 12 years since I found out that my five younger siblings and father were dead. And I think I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: every year, it gets a little easier to get through this time of year, but every year, it also hurts just as much as it did before. 

I think that’s the thing we forget to talk about. No matter how much time has passed since whatever you’ve lost, or whoever you’ve lost, you can still feel the pain as if you’d lost it all yesterday. What changes is your ability to get through that pain. 

What does that pain feel like? It’s different for everyone, but for me, it is a heavy, constricting fist around my heart that creates these pangs of pain every time I breathe so that my breaths turn into sharp knives slicing into my chest.

That was a pretty exaggerated description, and maybe it doesn’t make sense, but that is the best way I can describe what it feels like to re-experience grief. Most of the time, I don’t let anyone see me like that. Because the pain is so great for me, and I do not want anyone else to have to carry it too. It is already so heavy for me, and I can’t place that sort of weight on anyone else. That’s the prideful martyr in me, but it’s not really martyrdom: it’s fear. 

It is the fear that, if you do let someone take on even the smallest bit of your burdens, it will be too much for them and make them collapse to their knees; then, before they’re crushed to death, they will run, and you will be left to carry it all alone again. 

It is just easier to rely on yourself to carry it, so you don’t get used to the lighter weight and find yourself struggling to carry the extra weight they used to carry. That’s what I would tell myself, anyway. I still tell myself this, actually. 

I tell myself that I am the only person I can really count on 100% of the time, and perhaps that is true, but that doesn’t mean I have to carry it all, 100% of the time. Maybe there are times when I let go a little bit and times when I do carry it all on my own, but the truth is that none of us can carry what we do 100% of the time.

We’d all crumble if we did.