When you feel you are ready—when the ache and rage and numbness no longer makes it seem like a senseless intrusion—I want you to read this:

You have been missed by death, but someone you love has been hit. You have embarked upon one of the toughest things we must do in life.

Go on.

Go on when it no longer seems to make sense. Go on when it hurts too much to try or care. Go on when you feel guilty and somehow wrong to still be alive. Go on—damn it!—when you are so full of rage at the injustice of death that you want to strike out but you don’t know who to hurt. You must go on when others still caught up in the everyday trivialities of life seem an indignity to the sorrow you are feeling.

Death undoes us all and often in different ways. It can make harsh enemies of friends because they grieve in different styles or because they encounter each other at different phases of their mourning.

Death undoes us at its whim. We come apart at the strangest times, yet are unaccountably calm at times we might expect to come apart.

Nature knows what it is doing. It will serve up the horrible pain of sorrow in excruciating doses, then shut your feelings down for a time while you breathe for a bit and re-experience life.

Do not be guilty for being alive.

Do not turn your back upon enjoyment. Seize it. Enjoy it. You are going to need it. You can only make it through sorrow if you allow nature to give you respite at times and then accept the pain when it returns.

Nature does not care where you cry—neither should you. Death is too important a happening to control and fit neatly into some preconceived social structure. Grief is primitive. It scares us with its intensity, unpredictability and the crazy thoughts it brings. It makes us a part of raw nature and it is awful. Sorrowing takes longer than anyone thinks it should. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not on schedule or that you are not doing it correctly. We are all different, yet elements of the process are all the same.

There are well-recognized “stages” that include shock, pain and overt sorrow, guilt, anger and acceptance. Usually these do not proceed in an orderly fashion. They can be mixed together. You may got through all of them in a matter of hours and you will experience them all—accept perhaps acceptance—again and again. Acceptance is hard to come by and at best is a long time coming.

All of this is natural and it will go forward better if you don’t fight it.

Grieve when it hurts.

Enjoy when you can.

Live because it is the legacy you hold in trust from the person who died.

Alan Lyall, M.D.

Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend
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