It’s Summer, and I’m still Grieving

letting go of the guilt of grief

Photo by Juan Davila on Unsplash

Summer seems like an unusual month to grieve. But grief isn’t bound by laws of time. It’s been raining where I am. As Sylvia Plath once said: ‘I am glad the rain is coming down hard. It’s the way I feel inside.’

It’s the way I feel inside. Every day.

I feel surprised by the simple truth that the seasons I inhabit (externally) don’t mirror the ones in my heart. This disjunct between my intrinsic and extrinsic seasons compounds my sorrow. I feel a gnawing guilt about it.

I remember this one time in the 7th grade. My favourite teacher, Miss Rosie had named me class monitor: asking me to read & explain a chapter from our Social Studies book to the class. The week I was supposed to do this: I had been busy playing a video game with my cousins.

When I stepped foot into my classroom Monday morning—I would never, ever forget the looming black jolt of guilt that thundered down on me. Unbearable guilt. Like a brick-sized wall had crashed within. When Miss Rosie looked at me: no words were exchanged. Just a snow-cold stare. Silence flowed between us. She didn’t speak to me for a week.

Now looking back: that incident feels so small. Insignificant. Like how a lot of things grow with time, anyway. That accumulation of year upon year.

But I would never forget that sense of guilt. Like a lightning pierced me right to my belly.

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Sometimes I feel guilty about my grief. That same, night-black bog of it. Why do I struggle with self-compassion? I ask my therapist. Some days even she has no answers.

I laugh dreaming about how complex human emotions can be. & how we don’t always have to resolve the mess of them. How the beauty is IN the mess.

So let’s clap the dust off our hands, and sew our pain into a silk-rimmed quilt. Let us weave of it a quilt large enough to wrap our hungry bodies. Especially on days it grows snow-cold. And our window lies racked open by a thunderstorm.

That’s what I have decided this summer. I refuse to feel guilt over my grief.

I let myself crave for the bursting red of watermelons. I will bite into the cold dark pink of pomegranate all day. And then lock myself up in my bedroom & weep.

Both of them can co-exist. I just have to give them permission to sit beside each other. Like old, strange friends.

I will give myself time. I will be my own mother. I will let my heart mourn.

I have to admit that the watermelon juice is one of the only things I’ve been looking forward to, these days. Apart from this Food Writing workshop I’m facilitating now, and then again in September this year. There’s something so comforting about being in the presence of writers.

It is nourishing to live for everyday joys. They are, in fact, the biggest anchors of my life. They’re the ones that will knit my wounded heart, and hand it right back to me.