The Unbearable Heaviness of Grief





Crying, feeling bad, being depressed, talking incessantly about your loss, literally being obsessed with your troubles, are all understandable, acceptable, and somehow in the long run, actions that can somehow be dealt with.

What does one do when faced with trauma - heartache, betrayal, loss - one feels none of the surest and classical signs of grief. Instead, there is tiredness of the body and soul, a blankness of emotions (you don't feel anything and certainly nothing like grief) a heaviness of being, as if you are chained to the bowels of the earth, as if every part of your body weighs a ton, impossible to move and maneuver at will, as if your vocal chords are jammed from disuse and no matter how hard you try no sound, voice, moan resembling legible language would emerge.

I feel heavy with this grief. The tears, the memories, the faces of people close to me and now become strangers - unrecognizable, invisible - all crowd me. Every living moment is agony as if I'm lugging around this weight and burden of I no not what, yet it is bound to me, sometimes tied to my ankles, sometimes sitting hard on my chest, and at times enveloping me full from all sides crushing me to my core. How do I shed off this heaviness.

It makes me tired physically and emotionally to carry so much of weight of people who have gone forever never to return, but who inhabit my dreams every day and night. At times making me wonder whether it is the dream part that is real or this life where I'm sitting writing these words? How can I forget and go on with it as they say, when a part of my life is still in the past, a past that is still going on, happening, existing albeit in my mind or in my mind.


I fail to understand grief and sorrow. I can't cry, or get angry or do all the stages that one normally traverses when faced with loss, such as shock, denial, anger, and finally acceptance. Here, there is none of this, I only know of one state and that is an immobile, heavy rock that occupies a part of my life in such a way that I'm pressed hard and living, breathing, being has become difficult. How does one share this? or even articulate this non feeling, this absolute sense of claustrophobia, this feeling of being swamped and then buried beneath mounds of earth never to rise again.

I feel buried, entombed, six feet under. This inexplicable heaviness is on me pinning me to the ground and beneath and I do not know how to lift it, how to escape from under it to feel the elusive unbearable lightness of being!

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