Death makes me uneasy. I've always been scared of it, but it never really made me FEELbefore. That was until I lost someone. The truth is It always just made me scared, it always just made me sad, but not the real kind of sad, more like the fear kind. "Pity sad," the kind that you almost fake, to convince yourself that you are, because you should be because sad feels like the right thing to be.

My loss came with not only grief but guilt, and regret. I lost my biological father, and I lost a friend, neither of whom were very close to me, but I think that was what hurt the most. What stuck with me was the haunting feeling of losing a chance forever, and never being able to get it back. A chance to reconnect with a long-lost loved one, really getting to know my father, and a chance to make a lifelong friend, and possibly save him from the depression that took him.

The thing is you think you have time, you think you always have tomorrow, you think that person is fine, and only realize you are wrong when it is far too late. Death is just so final like that, and it waits for nobody to be ready for it, it certainly didn't wait for me.

As a result, death now makes me feel uneasy because I don't feel that kind of sad anymore when I think about it. In fact, I know if I think about it too much, think about THEM for too long, it will make me the dreaded kind of sad. The real, the raw kind. The "It's not fair" kind of mad sad that comes back, that creeps up on you, that eventually catches up to you, that swallows you by moments because it was always there, hiding, lurking in that dark, cold spot at the back of your mind waiting to be summoned, bound to rise, much like a tide.

The kind that makes tears slowly crawl down your cheeks, and slip into the creases of your mouth, making you taste the salt before you even realized your eyes were starting to well up. The kind that sometimes turns into the sob kind of cry. That makes you clutch your stomach like you just took a blow to it and you can't breathe, that makes you feel like you're going to throw up your heart onto your palms. That rattles your insides to remind you that you're still broken. The kind that makes you so aware that you are breathing, that you want to hold your breath. That almost makes you feel guilty to be alive. This is what my grief looks like sometimes.

If there is anything I have learned from my loss, and my pain is that grief is not a linear process or an easy one. I learned that you have to let yourself feel, not try to suppress these feelings, because they are powerful, they demand to be felt, and they will catch up to you. There will be days when you will feel completely normal, and others when you struggle to get out of bed or stop the tears from flowing on and on without an explanation or real cause.

My advice to you, is that on those days let yourself cry in rivers if that is what you feel, let yourself be angry and annoyed and let yourself scream "IT'S NOT FAIR!" because it's not, and because you need it. You need to let it out, and you have a right to do so in any way that feels right to YOU and to nobody else, remember that this is YOUR journey, YOUR healing. You can take baby steps, or giant ones, but take them. Take them even if sometimes it feels like you are stepping on shards of glass, because most of the time, it will be because you needed to bleed and open your wounds, let them breath, and be cleansed first, in order to scar and in order to heal.