The Long Void
In psychology, they say there are five stages to dealing with grief: denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and acceptance. The order is interchangeable. It depends on who you are as a person and your emotional template.
This is the most clinical way to look at grief. It almost assumes that if you know the stages in advance, dealing with grief and loss becomes easier. You can analyse your feelings and tell which stage you are in right now. If you are feeling angry, you know you are in the early stages.
However, knowing all of these stages in depth doesn’t make it any easier. Because you can never tell how long it will take to recover. You loved someone, and now you have to live without that person. There is no shelf life for grief. Denial and anger may have a shorter lifespan, so in a matter of days or weeks, you may find yourself past them. But after that, there is a long void.
Your heart becomes a black hole. People get bored of your stories. They are done sympathising with you. You have narrated the same thing again and again. You have told yourself everything that needed to be told. And yet, the feeling in your chest remains. This is profound sadness. The stage analysis has no answer for that. It can tell you that there will be sadness, but it cannot tell you how hard it will hit you.
You will often bargain over your decision to move away. You will think of all sorts of arguments, all sorts of ways to recover from this grief. It is like negotiating with the devil for a moment of peace. Nothing works. Nothing ever does. It is the kind of journey where you have to suffer, and there is no timeline for the suffering. They never tell you that in any book. You only learn by doing. You only learn by suffering.
The feeling gets so intense, so severe, that at one point you feel you could die of grief. The body becomes heavier. You want to hide in a corner and cry, but you cannot. You hate yourself for feeling too much. If you are dealing with grief, then I am sorry, but there are no shortcuts through it. The stages may be clinically established, and they may broadly reflect how grief unfolds, but there are no timelines to it.
Unfortunately, we all have to go through it and emerge as different people. We have to shed the old, wounded personality and become someone else—someone stronger and, hopefully, someone wiser.