Life is a Game of Perpetual Grief

There is no pain weightier than what you feel on the first day of returning to your home, abject emptiness, after burrying a loved one. It’s crushing and excruciating. It finally dawns on you properly that the absence you occupy at that very moment is perpetual, lacking their intermittent giggles and warm embrace.

The nature of life is such that this will happen to you a number of times until your own day of transitioning dawns on you. You will grieve for long, forget sometimes, and grieve again. At a time that you are convinced that you have finally accepted properly divine decree, another test will visit you: a unique somberness will grow on the familial tree you belong to.

You will kick and hoot when alone. The initial regret of not making enough time for them will visit you. You will beat yourself up.

“Perhaps if I had dropped everything I was doing and gone to see them, they would have survived,” you’ll tell yourself.

But at that very moment, what is done is done, and there is no undoing it. Death has done you yet another tragic blow. Grief visits you again. This time around, it drags its feet because it is heavier than it has ever been—obese, ugly, and woefully shaped—because it has taken so much from you already.

Again, it kicks you deep in your gut, chokes you and leaves you fighting for your life. This fight, nevertheless, isn't one of survival. It's a fight of respite, a symbol of life, your life. The puzzle that is life cannot be this hard a nut to crack. Whenever you are close enough to figuring it out, the worst will happen. You will lose again, grieve again, forget again, and grieve again.

When loss revisits, remind it that you are only tolerant of it because there is nothing you can do to keep it away. Remind it that you are learning to walk again, after being crippled by grief. Ask that it be merciful to you. You are human, and deserve to be fine again. If it listens, I envy you. If it doesn’t, I envy you even more. Life is not the end that we think it is. There is something beyond it. I know it because I lose a lot and deserve a chance to make it up to myself someday.

To live is to risk it all. To live is to accept to lose it all. Winning is anomalous because it is beautiful. Life is intrinsically brutal and chaotic. Embrace life. Be ready to lose it all because with or without your permission, you will lose. That piece of you that you’ve quitely tucked in a safe place will be brought out and roughed up. You will eventually be fine, but it will not be the end of your grief. Grief doesn’t end. It is the very fabric of life.

"Everything will be fine in the end, Morty. And if it isn't, it's not the end yet."