Growing and Grieving

I remember sitting on the sofa with my mum at five years old, crying that I missed my dad. I remember not knowing what I was sad about, I was two when he passed, so what did I miss? 

I remember being told he would be proud of me growing up. I remember being told I looked like him, acted like him, that I carried him, within me. But who was that? Who was he? Who am I if I portray a person I never even knew?

I remember being told he would be looking down on me, smiling, and that be a reason not to be sad, because no parent would want to see their child upset. I remember processing this at five years old and accepting it at face value, a reason not to be sad, because although I didn’t know him, he knew me.

Grief is a process that occurs when one loses someone they love, someone to never been seen again in the flesh, in person. It is a process of accepting they are not coming back, of accepting that life must go on for those that are still here. It is learning to cope with the overwhelming feeling of emptiness in your heart, and I say heart, because that’s what it feels like. It’s a physical pain. It’s denial, anger, frustration, depression, emptiness, the feeling that life is not worth living anymore. It is all of these things and more, so much more that words cannot even begin to describe.

Having lost other people in my life, I have been through the ‘standard’ process of grief, of missing someone so intensely you wish you could hear their voice again, have one last moment, say one last thing, get that one last hug. But nothing has ever compared to the grievance of someone I didn’t know, at such a young age, and the stages of grief that come with it. The stages in which you mature and develop, become new stages in which you process old or new information and life events. Look back on situations in childhood, teenage years, a few years ago, last year even, and you think of how you thought about it, the way you are perceiving the situation can be different now can’t it? Morals, thoughts, feelings, norms, opinions, attitudes change, we change, we evolve into the world around us, we shape ourselves to fit into the ever changing beautiful chaos that is the world we live in.

All of these things change within us over time, and we process old information differently as appose to how we processed it at the time. As I grew, and hit my pre-teen years, I loved my dad. My brother and I had a box of his things we often spoke about. Hitting my teen years, I hated him, he left me. I barely knew him, why am I supposed to be sad when I’m angry that I have been deprived of a father, of Father’s Days, “father-daughter time”, of all of these things that my mum single handily gave me growing up. I was angry and I convinced myself that I didn’t care. 

As an adult, these feelings arise less and less, his death has been accepted, the final stage that allows you to carry on with life as normal as possible, what I had been trying to accomplish for years. The acceptance that that person is no longer in your life as a person, but as a memory. A memory much for myself constructed from the memories of other people, of photographs, stories that will forever be cherished. And in those moments, those heart clenching moments where the grief takes over again, I miss my dad. The man whose persona is individual just to me, constructed into the man I want him to be.

To anyone, who continuously subconsciously grieved for a parent or guardian who passed away at such a young age, who struggles to this day with missing someone they never knew, I’m here with you. They WOULD be proud of you. Yes, maybe you would have turned out differently if they were still around, yes your life could be totally different, many, many things may or may not have happened the way they did. But don’t live in the “could have”, because that’s not where they would want you to be. What happened, happened. Continue doing you, hold your heart close and keep soldiering on.

They. Are. Proud.

You should be too. 

-          Katie-Jo

If you have any questions or are struggling with coming to terms with the death of a loved one, reach out to Katie-Jo at Kaatie_jo@hotmail.co.uk

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