A Friend in Hell

When I was young, I believed that getting older would produce a slow down in stress and that things would get easier.  Of course, the naivety of youth and the reality of you don’t know what you don’t know come into play.  A growing realization over years of observation and real-life experience(s) certainly blunted most of those fledgling decades when blissful ignorance was a zone of comfortable unawareness.

Grief is an awful thing.  Its so many things created from one thing that jettisons a functioning being into a gut churning G-force trajectory of unbearable shock.  Orbiting in a totally foreign reality one is left reeling with nothing from before to anchor onto combined with an all imploding hellish nowness.  There is no escape in such an atmosphere, its literally a death zone.

Some grief states and stages are survivable, some are not, and many must be carried like another layer of crushing heaviness. 

Loss as age proceeds is unavoidable and grief becomes a looming shadow fighting for limited space and time.  At a time when the setting sun should warm and soothe, loss and its associated effects fuel and fire up an aging physical cooling system, attempting to fire up an emotional furnace that is incapable of handling such a high level of intensity.

Hell is a state, which is a place, located in our minds.  It’s very real with a load of substance and an ability to create insanity.  It’s a merry-go-round with no off ramp or stop button.  It’s an all-consuming emotional ride that creates and manifests physical feelings and reactions that plunge and plummet a being into a bottomless pit of despair.

From explosive shock to deadening darkness there is the wild roller coaster of emotional torment.  These fluctuations are truly steppingstones on the pathway to madness.

Loss robs us of what we hold dear and rips our security into shredded leftover memories leaving us weak and mournful, yearning desperately for what once was but will never be again.

In this hell realm grief is our friend.  Initially seen as an unwelcome visitor that intrudes into our ‘secure’ existence, grief quickly becomes an enemy to fight and defeat.  The medicine to soothe and cure is perceived as a distasteful demonic ally to trauma combining forces to force us to demented levels of suffering.

Grief is the mirror on reality, its there to guide us to the inevitable acceptance of that unavoidable fact.  It shows us who we are and allows us to take responsibility for our reactions to traumatic actions.  Its that friend that will tell you the truth without sugar coating the reality.  Its that companion who will support and be with you all the way no matter how much you rail against their company.

Grief is not the awful thing.  It’s the thing that brings grief out that is truly awful.

​Hell takes over the room in your mind, grief is the doorway out.       
 
  

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