Fifty days of grief

Reading Time: 8 min

“Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again.”

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Fifty days in future

Fifty days.

They asked me how much time it takes to recover from a loss or grief. I said fifty days. Just fifty days.

That number does not make sense, right? It does not. Fifty days is just an arbitrary number. I said that to buy some time, so I could go easy on me. I said that so others would stop asking me how I am, at least for the next fifty days. I said that because it seemed like an appropriate time that is long enough, so I do not appear trivializing the loss.

In a blink of an eye, the fifty days were gone. Despite living through the aforementioned fifty days, I was not as all right as I wanted to be; I was still distressed. Fifty-one days later I wondered – Did I go on easy on me? If all this time I was waiting for myself to be better, was I really healing??

Past perfect

This was a recurrent thought earlier this year just seven weeks into a breakup. I revisited this thought today on the death anniversary of my father. Life has repeatedly taught me that it can and will be unquestioningly unpredictable. I can plan my entire life and set a roadmap for a future built brick by brick on the toils of the present. I can conceive a lifetime of happiness, comfort, and contentment. I can imagine a perfect life.

But this perfection is non-existent. That future was fragile. The bricks were loose rocks in the gravel. When the avalanche came, it gave no warning. It surrounded me and dragged me down the slope. I lost all sense of my whereabouts. I kept breathing; through the mud, the dust, the wounds, and the silent screams I kept breathing.

It takes time to dig myself out of the rubble.  The higher I am invested in someone or something, the deeper into the mud I sink in after it all slips away, and the more effort it takes to get out of it. No matter how many arbitrary deadlines I give myself, I would not get better. Time alone does not help me get better.

Clear and present grief

 “Each person’s grief has its life span; it needs to follow its own path.”

Rick Riordan, The Tyrant’s Tomb

There is no right pattern to grieve. Some display anger, some show apathy, some suffer from extreme guilt, some withdraw from the world, and some indulge in every sensory stimulation available to them. You and I can react differently to the same loss.

There is no right process to grieve. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance; I may go through them all, you might skip a stage, some would stay stuck in a stage going around in loops.

There is no right intensity to grieve either. No one can decide how much you grieve. No one can question you why you do not look sad enough or why you feel the hurt of a loss even after a substantial period. No one can decide when the grief is resolved either; old pain has an innate quality to emerge when you least accept it.

There is no one-size-fits-all pain.

A point in pain

The pain I felt was not just the presence of grief, it was also the absence of love and comfort that I was missing. I missed the love of the people that loved me; some were lost to death and some to life. I missed the comfort the fading memories had provided. Yet, I waded through the sorrow to get on the other side of pain.

“Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.”

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

I chose not to hide from the grief. I recalled every good memory, relived it, relished it, and savoured it. Even in the throes of the grief, I ensured I honoured those memories. Despite how tortuous it sounds, the very act of reminiscing in what was good made it easier to not be overwhelmed by all the unpleasant. I learned to live with that pain.

The right time

Grief changes everything. It changed how I thought. It changed how I behaved. It changed how I perceived people around me. It changed how I appreciated my life. As much as I wanted life to go back to how it was, I understood that things would never go back to how it was.

Life always gets normal, albeit a new normal, a different normal. It takes time, rather the right length of time, to get that normalcy. The pain diminishes, the grief reduces. Life gets a new meaning. Some find meaning in the past. Some find meaning in the memories. Some find meaning in the new people they meet. Some create meaning as they move forward. All the same, the quest for meaning needs an active effort. 

Perhaps, some meaning in all that grief is what we all are looking for. You find that meaning in those fifty days. I take years to find any satisfactory significance. But we both outlast our grief. If you ask me now how much time it takes to recover from some loss or grief, my answer will be simple – as long it takes.

Please do leave a comment below and tell me how you deal with grief. A shared connection is one of the best ways to find some meaning in loss. Let’s share. You can read my posts on solitude and happiness here. I clicked this tree on a small beach in Koh Chang, Thailand. Follow me on Instagram for more travel photographs.

13