When I used to imagine the way grief affected a person, I pictured a regular human living

their regular life, just a little sadder and tired and looking a bit gray. Grief was depressing and

lethargic and it bored me. Grief seemed like sadness taking itself too seriously. It felt stagnant

and anticlimactic and begging for attention and condolences. I secretly hated being around

people who were grieving, because they felt like heavier, less-fun versions of themselves. Grief

felt like a particularly bad rainstorm that everyone was impatiently waiting for the end of. It was

something that was sad and inconvenient, but would pass eventually. It would pass. It would pass

and the sun would come back out and take its rightful place in the center of the sky, and we’d all

be happy again, and things would be normal again.

But when I experienced grief for the first time, it felt like the world as I had known it

began to, all of a sudden, rip itself apart at the seams, the threads springing loose one by one and

then rapidly in a line straight down the middle, all around me, everywhere I looked, the very

fabric of my existence started tearing itself open with no sign of stopping, and every time I

braved a peek at my surroundings, thinking all of the stitches had finally come undone, I’d turn

around and witness another snap here, and there, and it would just keep going and going, this

never ending, seemingly autonomous destruction that the world was inflicting upon itself,

ripping its layers to shreds and churning up bits of mauled fabric, indiscriminately and violently

uprooting my lived experience and the ground I stood on until I lost my balance and fell into the

mess of seams ripping open like chasm and began to feel the encasings of my own body split

open, over and over, skin loosening around my bones until everything inside me lost shape and I

looked like nothing I had ever known, nothing I could recognize, I could find no semblance of

my old self.

That’s when I finally grasped it–that I was transforming, that grief was transforming me.

I was going to come out of this an entirely reconstructed version of myself. How terrifying, and 

how beautiful.