When people think of grief they think of it as an event.

A funeral, someone has died.

There’s been a break-up or a breakdown.

Your car has crashed.

But that’s not grief, that’s something that has happened to you.

Grief is the small fracures that build to cracks that make you easy to break.

Because when those events happen, you shatter.

You scramble to collect the pieces to build a face of someone that has not been smashed.

You sound like fibreglass when you walk, crunching through the streets, trying not to be loud enough for someone to ask, ‘Are you okay?’ When you loosely say ‘I’m fine’ while holding your face together.

When I got asked what grief was to me, I could only see it visually. I would see this glass mosaic of a person that reflected only what others wanted to see. In moments of disparity, I would say that I feel crunchy as if I was this mosiac person walking about with glass feet.

In my profession, outside of University I found out about grief and bereavement to support the people that I needed to support. I started to see grief differently, that the people who say ‘you are fine’ was them being afraid of grief too, when they should be saying ‘I’m fine with your grief’. I would seek out how people grieve and noticed the small losses people encountered of the missed connections and the maybe next times. All of which formed these tiny fractures. I began to wonder if people feel greatly in these events because it’s not one but thousands of small loses.

When you first experience grief, it will be loud. Shutting it off means it will jump scare you later. The greatest triumph was learning to give yourself permission to feel for as long as you want, no excuses. This was my first lesson on loss. Grief is a process not a task was my second lesson. Acknowledge that it exists, giving it a name means you can welcome it, nurture it, so when it returns you can say ‘Good, Grief’ I know who you are.