Fragile

March is here, and so many emotions arrive with this new month. Sadness and anger have crept back in but they are also met with happiness that I have successfully made it through a full year. When I started my grief journey last March I didn’t know what to expect. In school I learned in psychology classes about the stages of grief. However, I learned quickly that textbook grief and real life grief are not the same. Textbook grief looks so clean and segmented whereas grief in real life is very messy and chaotic.

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One morning in the first few weeks of my grief I sat in bed and felt like I held the weight of the world. I was bogged down with sadness, anger, bitterness, and fears of the future. I didn’t know what to do to or how I could live my life without my son. I started looking at the women in my life who had children pass away at all stages of life and try to find courage through them. They all seemed to be living their lives normally and looked happy, I used them as motivation to get myself slowly pieced back together.

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Slowly, throughout the year I have found some pieces of myself and put them back together. Although, some of the pieces were just too broken to put back. I found new ways to patch the holes of myself. A year out, I know that I’m not fully put together but I’m somewhat sturdy. Often times though I feel that I still need a huge “FRAGILE: HANDLE WITH CARE” sign across my forehead.

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As I got closer to the end of February my fragileness started to intensify. The thoughts that I have been without Ezra for almost a full year started causing pieces of myself to fall away again. Although, fixing damaged pieces has gotten much easier now than it was months ago.

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At the start of my grief journey, I read an article a man wrote about the grief process of losing his son. He described the grief like a piano had crashed down on a stage during a performance. In the beginning everyone is shocked and doesn’t know how to handle this huge item. Although, as time goes by everyone works around the piano and it slowly gets a bit easier, however the piano is always there. I loved this representation and it is so true to the journey of grief.

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Although, I will always long for my son and grieve his short life I also found happiness throughout this year too. I feel like a mask has been lifted from my face and ironically I see things so much brighter through my grief. Before losing Ezra, I was so focused on tasks and didn’t stop to take in the beauty around me. My fragileness has caused me to stop and refocus and in doing that I have found so much more than I could imagine. Grief is messy and chaotic, but it can also cause beauty to show in the most unexpected places.