The Foreign Land

Being shocked into grief is like crash landing into a foreign land. We are unaware of the new culture and customs. We have no language with which to communicate our feelings and we wander aimlessly in a daze, disconnected from the alien reality we are forced to engage with. 

We can continue to wander and be dazed and disconnected or we can choose the usually more difficult option of facing our grief head on and try to make sense of it all. It is sometimes easier on our fragile minds if we maintain a sense of disassociation as we are "hardwired" to do- a coping mechanism that has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years- to psychologically distance ourselves from trauma so we can continue to hunt, gather, make shelter, procreate, etc. Sometimes it can simply be too hard, through our fog of exhaustion, to put in the now extraordinary effort needed to stare at grief through subjective eyes. If we wish or if it is demanded of us we can maintain our sense of being a foreigner with no common language and try to look out through the opaque prism of anxiety and otherness. But we would be forever distrusting, vigilant and alert, squinting at an angle through our half-closed eyes. 

But there comes a time in the life of most aggrieved people when we have to learn how to navigate this new place. Maybe this comes from the loneliness and aloneness of grief, maybe this comes from griefs' ability to be an occasional mirror to our own character and we recognise our own poverty of control, maybe this comes from an evolution of language creation, of an increased communication in this new place as individual words, sentences and eventual conversations are exchanged. However this comes about we need to learn not just its geography but its customs and habits, the newness of things without our loved one, the considerations it forces upon us. We have to map the roads, learn the side-streets, make ourselves familiar with the locals. Simply put, we have to put the hours in. There are no shortcuts. 

What does this new place- grief- look like? This new place looks as unique to us as the uniqueness of grief is to all aggreived people. This new place is us. My grief is a reflection of me because when I take great time and great consideration of introspection I find myself looking back, albeit a facet of me I have never seen before. 

We find that this land is not fixed. Some roads were put down a long time ago and are cracked with the weight of age, some are freshly laid but some, with courage, we can pave ourselves. Always there is the unfamiliarity of walking through new places without our loved one beside us, a nearby vacuum where there will never be light. But as they have helped shape the person we have become through our shared love, their past life will help us shape our future. They might not be with us in our new land but their influence is ever present. If our love for them, and theirs for us, is so influential that it makes us look into our grief with courage and curiosity, maybe this new land might not be so daunting after all.