the beginning

Everything for and about me changed when my dad died one week after my twentieth birthday. A decade marked culturally as one of transformation and some of the presumed to be most carefree and thoughtless times of our adult lives, my twenties took on an entirely new meaning before they even really had the chance to begin.

Now, in 2024, as I approach my 29th birthday, I reflect on how significant it is that this decade of my life has been so full of loss. I remember in the earlier days of my grief regularly receiving comments from strangers in casual conversation at the grocery store or my college internship about how simple my life must be, how the person across from me just wished we could trade places so they could time travel back to the days of their youth when life still, to them, seemed so beautiful, harmless and carefree. A time when they felt cared for, supported, and safe. These conversations returned me to a place when my father was still alive, when even as still just a little girl, I was surrounded by voices of well-meaning strangers regularly reminding me that these years, these years of youth, must certainly be some of the best a person can ever have. I remember as young as 7 years old wondering, how could this be?

Consumed by these conversations, and the eventual death of my father after his terminal diagnosis when I was eight years old, I was filled with the emptiness I felt from hearing these years were supposed to be the best of them. For me, they were marked with endless trauma, loss, and fear, even before the actual facing of death. As a result, I spent a lot of my early twenties frenzied in an anger and bitterness so palpable I could feel it climb my esophagus each morning, ready to burst from my mouth when I got out of bed to the next person to remind me what a great time it must be to be young, careless, and free.

The loss of my father changed everything about me, in the way that it brought me to my knees and forced me for the first time to look at the grief all around and within me, even before the phone call I received that he’d taken his last breath. Much of my bitterness toward the world in those first few years stemmed from this belief that so few people my age knew what I was facing, and because of my youth it was so common and easy for strangers to believe wholeheartedly that I must not yet know much about what it is to be a person, and how pain can sit inside of us with no where to go for so long we confuse it to be who we are, who we must be.

As I have continued healing these last 9 years, and met some amazing people along the way, I have realized that grief is an integral part of our twenties for so many young people. While not everyone has faced the same loss I have, they have faced their own, often feeling an even deeper loss with no where to go with their pain, when the cultural message of this time is that is one big, wonderful, party. I am creating this blog to share my own stories along the way, while also creating a community for grievers to share their own.

I have learned that grief is so much more than a physical loss of life, but a series of painful realizations and experiences that can come from a loss of an identity, relationship, opportunity, or so much more. Grief can be a choice, and in many cases a beautiful path to choose to become the next emerging version of who we are.

TBC

(to be continued)