A Message for the Brokenhearted

It’s been four years since my sister died on a cold December evening. Four years since my Decembers became forever changed.

As a friend once said to me, grief doesn’t get better; it gets different. For me, four years has been long enough that my grief feels different, but not so long that I’ve forgotten what it felt like when the bottom dropped out of my world.

I wrote the words below and shared them on Instagram in the weeks after my sister died. Since then, I’ve shared them every year. They feel important to me because these aren’t the words of someone whose grief feels different. These are the words of someone in despair, someone who wasn’t sure that any version of happiness would ever be possible again.

When absolutely nothing made sense, I wrote the words that I needed to hear. As we enter the peak of the holiday season and turn the page to another year, I share these words with you. Perhaps they might hold something that you need to hear too. 

What I want to tell you is that your pain is yours. Sometimes there is no lesson. Sometimes there is no greater meaning. Sometimes there is nothing to fix (no matter how uncomfortable that makes other people). Sometimes hurt just hurts and your only job is to tend to yourself and to tend to your pain and to let people love you. 

I trust that peace will find me one day. Today is not that day. If it’s also not that day for you, I want you to know that you aren’t alone. I am here with you. There are others here too.

A couple of weeks later I wrote:

May you remember that the only way forward is through, even when it hurts like hell. 

May you let things be as bad as they really are and know that this means you’re going through a hard thing, not that something is wrong with you. 

May you lean into your pain, grieving what once was, finding ways to honor and carry it with you.

May you have the courage to tell the truth about how hard and scary and painful life can be. May you be the first one to be brave and vulnerable. May you see what beautiful things can happen when you let others see inside.

May you trust that sometimes there is nothing you need to do except let things be exactly as they are, let yourself be exactly as you are, and know that things will change and soften as they will, when they will.

May you find a place to rest your weary head – a place not where you expect things to change, but where you can, for just a moment, find a tiny space to breathe.

May you let yourself be with your own feelings of powerlessness and uncertainty. May you know that you can trust yourself to find your way through.

May you remember that life is never either/or, that joy and pain and wonder and grief can all exist right alongside each other.

May you be a companion to yourself and treat yourself with exquisite kindness.

May you find the people willing to be with your pain, and the people who will stay. If you’re lucky enough to have just one person like that in your life, I hope you’ll let them love you.

I wish you tiny moments of comfort wherever you can find them.