I’ve phantom typed this article probably a thousand times in the past week alone, but I felt that this needed to be said, especially with the holidays threatening to swallow us whole within the next few weeks.

No matter what pills we take or how many miles we run a day, we can’t escape death. We’ll be surrounded by our friends and family, those that we love, when we’re lowered into the ground and buried underneath the weight of all the life we never got to live.

But my article this week isn’t written just to make you hyper-aware of death. In fact, I started out writing this with the intent of making you feel better about losing someone, but I guess I messed that up too. Let me start over.

We’re no strangers to loss. Friends, family, classmates…we’ve always had to say goodbye because it was someone else’s time to go. There might be places that you still can’t force yourself to go to or foods that you can’t stomach because “that was their favorite”. Sometimes you may have to turn off the radio to keep from having to hear that one song that drowns you in a flood of memories, some happy and some sad…heartbreaking, even. There might be days where you just can’t hold back the stress and the anguish and the tears anymore, and it all comes out in a rush like when someone pops a balloon. You have to ask “Why did they have to go so soon? It’s like my life was really only just beginning, and now I’ve had to say goodbye”. You may have just gotten engaged, and now you can’t help but picture yourself walking down the aisle without your father to escort you, or your sister to be there as a Maid of Honor. Mother’s Day may be the worst day of the year in your eyes, just because you don’t have anyone to shower with attention and gifts and love. There might be a grandchild that’s just been born who’ll never know their great grandmother because she had to take her last breaths, and you understand that but at the same time, you don’t.

On March 31^st, 2016, I was on my way to school just like any other day. I was worried, and afraid, and scared, because not even a week before we had had to admit my grandmother, Belvie, into the hospital again for what may have been the last time. She had been having trouble breathing and her health had gotten progressively worse, and to this day I’m still not sure which ailment finally broke the camel’s back and took her away from me…well, us (sometimes I forget that she belonged to other people too). Anyway, she had been the tenant of hospitals and nursing homes for about a month prior and I was ready for her to come home. She had bounced back from worse than this, and I fully expected to see her come home and take up residence on my couch again before the end of April.

That morning, I just wanted to go to school and forget about the never-ending waves of fear that kept me awake at night; I yearned to just go to classes that I was breezing through and talk to people that made me laugh and that I loved. I wanted to be a teenager for just six hours of my life.

I didn’t even get into the doors.

I reached down in my pocket as soon as I pulled into my parking space, grabbing my phone just to make sure that I had remembered to turn my volume off.

I had eleven missed calls from my mom, and caught her in the middle of the twelfth.

“Anna? Baby? I need you to come home now, okay?” I can still remember how calm she was when she shattered the carefully constructed denial that I had been building for myself.

I remember calling my best friend at the time and asking her to collect my classwork as I pulled out of the parking lot to speed home, trying my hardest not to burst out in tears and cause an accident on such a horrible day.

While I want to continue talking about the day my Gram died, I know I need to get on to the point. My point is, it still hurts. It hurts, and every time I think about it, it’s like a stab in the heart and a punch to the gut. It’s only been six months but I find myself sometimes forgetting what she looks like, or the sound of her voice. And yet, it’s only been six months. It has the right to crack open my rib cage and squeeze my heart to the point of bursting because I’ve never known loss like this.

But I know that the pain goes away. In a year or two, I’ll be able to think about it without wanting to break down and become a sobbing mess, and life will move on.

My advice to you is, hurt. You don’t have to be strong, and no one expects you to be when you lose someone you love. I want you to take a deep breath, hold it for a minute, and scream. Scream to let out the pain and the anger and the resentment, and then cry if you need to. And I want you to remember that they’re in a better place, and they’re happy now. They are no longer worrying, or hurting, or afraid. They’re safe now, and you’ll see them again one day. I promise.