Mourning Someone Who Isn't Dead
A part of the journey of life is choosing the network of people who partake in that journey with you. It can feel heartbreaking when you learn that someone you thought was apart of your journey, can't be anymore. The decision for your health, your soul and your well-being when you still hold love for that person, have found forgiveness, or when you miss the momets that were beautiful is never an overnight one. Mourning people who aren't dead takes strength, courage and trust in yourself day in and day out because life doesn't make that decision for you.
Overtime, society has adopted that in grieving, we all follow something along the lines of the stages of grief. When there is a death of a relationship, the stages of grief are not simply experienced but become coupled with an added heart aching element, which is the act of restarining oneself from reaching out to the person you once loved and perhaps still do. It's been three years since I began mourning someone who isn't dead and I still find myself experiencing some or all of the stages of grief: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. When someone is dead, we want more than anything to see the special person who passed so that we can hug them one last time, kiss them one last time, laugh with them one last time, hear them say 'I love you' one last time or tell them 'I love you' one last time. It takes indescribable resilience to endure the stages of grief for someone who is just a cup of coffee, a phone call or an email away.
Naturally, as a considerable amount of time has passed, human's memories begin to chop and change, cut and paste, omit and add. It's due to this process that I began to find myself forgetting the severity of situations that unfolded, the intensity of emotions I felt in those moments and the details of the abuse. I started to unintentionally romanticise the time we shared by glorifying minor moments of bliss over major scenes from hell. When I began romanticising our relationship, I mourned the loss of it more acutely because I began second-guessing myself: 'But that day was really fun.', 'But that only happened because you acted like that.', 'But remember how much love he showed you.' Initially, whilst my head told me these things, I could trust in my gut and heart because they held on to the memories for me with their faultless intuition. But the longer my head romanticised, the less ability my gut and intuition had to maintain those initial feelings.
I started having to chase the ghost of the girl who found the strength to cease contact because I owed it to her not to cave over a person who would indefinitely ruin my life.
But that feels irrefutably difficult when you've lost the strength you'd once found. And it feels even moreso when you begin to question a serious, almost irreversible decision you've made.
It's unlikely that if you're mourning someone who is alive, your relationship has ended over good terms. Friendships and romantic relationships that end over good terms don't usually involve prohibition of contact. But what is likely is that the lingering of their memory in your life will haunt you. It haunted me. It still haunts me. And I've become accustomed to living a life with an element of ongoing and undoubted fear as the threat of them, their life and their being is constant. This fear doesn't control me but I certainly do not control the fear. It sneaks up on me in moments where I do not have the capacity to strangle it in my hands with rationale, such as in nightmares or resurfaced memories. I suppose until they do die, this fear will inevitably prevail.
I wish that, as a society, we spoke more about mourning the living. Currently, it's a fairly unspoken concept that when experienced can feel isolating and confusing, making it an easy feeling to dismiss and supress. But it mustn't be because it is entirely possible to mourn a person who has not died. The phrase 'dead to me' wouldn't exist if it weren't. Although it's painful to undergo the feelings I've outlined, please know that if you undergo them, I have too. You are not silly, you are not crazy, you are not lying, but most importantly, you are not alone.
Kisses,
COS x
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