I used to shame myself because how I dealt with the grief from my father’s death (5 years ago today) was different from how I managed my boyfriend’s death (3 years ago tomorrow.)
My father lived a full life. He came to the US from Cuba to pursue freedom after having cut sugar cane for two years in Cuba without pay for asking permission to leave Cuba in the late 1960s. Shortly after coming to the United States, he met my mother. Together they set up a small store in Brooklyn for people from the community to shop for their Santeria practices that they brought to the US from whatever countries they came from.
People in the community grew to love my father, and though he was strict with us, he was incredibly charming, and he was big fan of enjoying life, a trait that I have as well but took to an extreme and found myself struggling with addiction. Yikes. But back to my father, if there was ever music playing, he was the first to get up and dance, even as he became an older man with crippling knee pain, and then he would follow up that movement with a voracious appetite to eat any and all the good food.
So when he died at age 90, though I was pained to see his journey with us end, I also processed his death as a natural occurrence. My father had the privilege of aging surrounded by loved ones. He danced through his final years and traveled and saw the world. It was a natural ending to a well-lived life when he died on April 27, 2018.
My boyfriend, Ian, and his death nearly crushed me. Ian was in recovery from addiction to opiates, and as happened to so many others getting clean and sober, the pandemic ripped people from their support systems. Ian relapsed, and within days he was gone. I was devasted because I had already seen myself in Ian’s future. We talked about love, marriage, kids, and where we would live and travel to. We spent so much time making plans that the moment he passed, it was like, not only was his life cut short, but my mind had also interpreted his death as equivalent to my future being ruined and deemed hopeless.
Imagine looking down a brightly lit hallway where you can see every part of your future that you’re excited to walk toward, and as you start confidently making strides, the power goes out. You can’t see anything, and you think the lights will never come back on. That’s what life was like until I got sober and started working around my grief.
Today I understand why one death hit me differently than the other and that it’s okay that they were different experiences. I know that there is no letter of approval that the universe will send me to tell me that I have been grieving the “right” way, and if you’re missing a loved one, this is your reminder of that, too. Stop waiting for an external sign that you’re doing it “right” because that sign only comes from within.
If you need support navigating loss, don’t hesitate to reach out.
One helpful strategy to work through grief is to write about it, so I welcome you to check out my free writing workshop if you want to take a baby step toward telling your story of a lost loved one.
