During my early days with grief, the dreaded first year with all of it’s crushing firsts, the pain was palpable. I lost my brother at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. His name was Jamal, he was 45 years old and he died quicker than my mind could comprehend. One source of deep pain was, and still is, that he was all alone at the end. His life ended with not nearly as much grace as his life deserved.
Losing my brother forever changed me. It was the first time I had been faced with pain so raw, that it impacted me not only emotionally and mentally, but physically too. I thought I was doing fine, moving along grief like you would a jigsaw puzzle, with calculated steps despite the chaos of pieces not fitting. I thought I was doing fine, until I wasn’t. I started having panic attacks in the car, during work, at random. It’s as though my body couldn’t house the very human toll of sadness I was feeling. The truth is I had never experienced grief like this before and I had no blueprint for what to expect. Before this, death and its impending sadness was just that — sad. It came and it left like a breeze with no real evidence of its arrival. But this was, as my mother said, a tornado that we were all in the middle of with no real timeline of its end. Jamal, the force that he was, losing him was losing my childhood, it was losing a part of myself.
The immensity of pain made me quickly understand that this grief was not going anywhere. Just like you cannot turn the experience of love off at will, grief operates the same way. It becomes a part of you. It changes you and I learned early on, especially with the physical manifestations of grief I was experiencing, that it was stronger than my desire to will it away. It hurt, and I didn’t like it. So I surrendered to feeling it fully by surrendering myself to the sadness. Rather than looking away or distracting myself, I decided to get to know my grief, give it a name, welcome it to my home, let it sit with me and do what it needed to do. I learned that it needed to be seen and validated. It was as painful as it was liberating because I was making space for something that every fiber of my being was trying to push away. It is not in our nature to want to feel discomfort and yet here I was asking grief to be my friend. It was teaching me that I had to allow it space in my life and walk alongside it, not around it.
I look around with new eyes and it makes sense to say that so much of the world seems to be broken-hearted and grieving. Grief hasn’t been given the space it deserves in our collective consciousness. Today, I can honestly divide up my life in two parts, with Jamal and without Jamal. With Jamal is the beautiful ignorance that I would love to have again, the one where he is alive and thriving and I am not someone who had to walk with grief and its many emotions. It feels light and airy, full of hope. Without Jamal is a life marred with pain, sadness and awareness. And yet, this feels like a re-birth of sorts. My world is alive but one with a hole in it, in the shape of Jamal and I am learning to walk around it, almost avoiding it but seeing it nonetheless, sometimes with love, sometimes with haste. My biggest conflict with loss is that I have become a better version of myself since experiencing grief and I don’t know how to rectify that. But that is not up to me; the pieces land where they land, parts of us rearrange, expand to make room for new pieces of us, born from grief.
Just like anything difficult, we must go through it rather than around it, we must endure rather than avoid. Grief is no exception and it is demanding. Our grief will be proportionate to the love we hold. Today, I am thankful for my grief, for it is in this space that I get to be with my late brother. It is my sacred time with him and it belongs only to us. It’s not to say that it doesn’t hurt. That is a given. It’s just that losing Jamal has taught me that living means to live in the full range of human emotion and to be grateful for the time that we do have with our lost ones, that gratitude is a gift born from the difficult journeys we are willing to walk on so we can be taught their lessons.
So I sit here, a sister to Jamal and a friend to grief, loss weaving these two facets of my life, holding them together. It is in this space where love lives, and perhaps my childhood.
