It was just before the start of my freshman year when I lost the man who raised me. When I started college at UCSB, I was surrounded by strangers and too afraid to share my grief with anyone. So I stayed silent; this was my big mistake.
Whenever my step-dad came up in conversation, I used the present tense. At the time, I was meeting countless people a day, and it just seemed easier to pretend like it didn’t happen.
Image via Charles M. Schulz
You know those moments when someone mentions they’ve lost someone, and you don’t know what to say? It’s hard to imagine losing someone you love, and even after you’ve lost a loved one, they don’t actually feel ‘gone’. Just this morning while making breakfast I had toast for the first time in ages (my step-dad made amazing toast). So I pictured him in the kitchen liberally buttering the warm, crunchy bread to go with a large, tasty scramble he made every Saturday morning.
Three years ago, while I pushed away my grief, I found myself unable to remember things about my step-dad: the sound of his laugh, and his cozy bear-hugs.
After two years of this silence I attended a grief group. Other students who’d lost someone did similar things, like using ‘the present tense’, and feeling afraid to share their grief with the world. They helped justify my feelings and thoughts by telling me their stories.
Sometimes I’d see another student walking around campus from the grief group and we’d smile to one another. It was comforting to know that amongst thousands of people, I was not alone. It made me feel braver about confronting my grief.
We have all grieved, whether a breakup, or the loss of a loved one. And we all grieve differently. It’s unfortunate that our silence makes death such a mystery. For this reason, I felt that I had to hide my grief, and fortunately I learned to embrace it before I distanced myself from my mom, or even turned to more damaging ways to cope.
Grief is powerful, but in my experience it took only one brave moment to make embracing my grief exponentially easier. In my case, that moment was the first time I used the past tense when talking about my step-dad. Suddenly I started saying his name, and telling stories that I’d retrieved from confronting my grief.
Losing my step-father isn’t some big secret anymore, but the truth. I learned to not let loss become anything other than my reality. I encourage anyone who is adjusting to life with loss to recognize that we all grieve differently, but also pushing aside the fear of sharing grief really does help… as ending my silence helped me.