Image: National Association of Black Journalist’s Logo
There seems to be no singular experience in human existence. There is always someone out there who has experienced something similar. The same can be said about grief. I lost my brother when I was 17, and so did many other people in the world, yet it still felt so singular. It still feels like no one could feel what I felt — that pit in my stomach that wouldn’t go away, knowing there was nothing I could do to change it.
A hard truth I had to learn was that there are some wounds that never heal, and some tears that never dry. When they talk about grief, they say there are stages. In the moment, what brought me the most solace was that I would one day reach the acceptance stage. I just thought that at some point, the feeling that something is fundamentally wrong with the world would disappear. But they don’t tell you that sometimes there is stillness. It doesn’t feel like you’re moving towards any point of resolution. It feels like locking all the grief in one room and ignoring the room’s existence. When I’m having fun with my friends, when I’m laughing about a stupid TikTok, when I’m on the phone for hours with my sister, when I’m learning something new in class that piques my interest, that room moves further and further down the hallway until I almost forget it exists. It’s like being back to my 17-year-old self who didn’t know that pain was lurking around the corner. Then, at one random point in the day, it all comes back that I can’t text or call him to tell him about my friends or the funny TikTok. I used to be afraid of the stillness because it always ends. It feels like going through the motions all over again. In those moments I always felt myself wondering when I would reach the end of this journey. When I would feel normal again.
The truth is, normal is different for everyone after you lose someone. The way I viewed things in that moment, at 17, was different from my thought process now. Grief can be singular — I don’t believe that it comes in stages. There is no way to generalize an experience felt so differently by everyone. I kept trying to read and draw comparisons between my stories and others’, but ultimately I was doing myself a disservice. Normal is something created from within. For me, I had to learn to find strength in the stillness. To not feel like I was doing anything wrong by laughing and enjoying life again. That was me trying to rediscover myself because I truly believe, after something so life-altering, you have to find yourself again. If there is any wisdom that I could give my 17-year-old self, it is to understand that it’s okay to feel. That I don’t have to rush to reach some kind of conclusion to it all. There is no right or wrong way to handle grief. I’ve found that it has made me enjoy all the little moments in a day. I’ve learned to not rush anything anymore, to allow myself the grace to live in the moment and trust the process of life.
Justine Koffi is a fourth-year Strategic Communications major with a minor in Computer Science. (NABJ’s Treasurer) AK980062@wcupa.edu