Dealing with Grief

I recently lost a cousin. I went to his funeral knowing emotionally I was alright. Grief is very tolerable for me. I know death is inevitable and while his life was cut short, I had accepted God’s say in this. My cousin left this world doing good things and helping people.

The service was beautiful. It was great through all the pain that my family was able to come together and visit– laughing about my cousin’s life and legacy. It’s sad when events like a funeral happens, but it also brings the family together with laughs and great food.

Later that night, while I was back home and cleaning up the kitchen, tears began to stream down my cheeks. It caught me off guard as the tears dotted the same counter I was wiping. All that day I watched people cry and never once did I shed a tear.

I don’t feel awkward when people cry. Human emotional and the need to deal with intense feelings, especially those stirred by an event like death make sense to me. The need to cry is understandable. It feels good to cry, even when I don’t feel like I need to.

Crying isn’t going to solve anything I found myself saying. It won’t bring him back. I certainly wasn’t the closet to him. I did not see him very often. Why should I cry when all these other people obviously felt more?

And that is my problem. I’m sure it’s a problem for a few of you, too. At some point you have to stop rationalizing feelings. While I was actively giving myself a reason not to respond, my feelings were still there. Even if didn’t know exactly how to name them, my feelings were present.

Many times I rush through the supposed “5 Stages of Grief.” And I’m sure I go through the stages ‘out of order’. But your feelings never speed through them. They don’t keep up with your psyche. That is why when I finally was doing some mundane task, they crept through the recesses of my mind and released. Once I allowed myself to stop thinking, I began feeling. And those feelings hit hard.

I loved my cousin. He was a good man and despite my rationale on why I did not need to cry earlier, I was crying now. I needed to cry then even when I didn’t realize what was happening until I saw the tears on the counter.

And after I cried, I felt better. Yes, I did rationalize that this was me finally coming out of the final stage of grief emotionally although mentally I did days before. Ultimately, I acknowledged that I needed to just feel in that moment and that was alright.

Grief is a reminder that emotions are not always the most rational. We as beings, do not need to be always rational when feeling them.