I have fallen in love with people and places.
People that have shown me great amounts of gratitude, who have cared for me when I hit rock bottom, who loved me and left me with no reason, and who were only supposed to be a part of my life for a short amount of time. Places that have revealed a euphoric tinge in my soul, that have sparked excitement or safety, that have shown me mother nature’s tragic beauty. I have lived with every ounce of my being: moments where I felt nothing but purity, times where I thought I was invincible, and days where I thought I would never make it through this life without being broken into a million pieces.
It was not until the end of December that reality slapped me square in the face.
Death is something humans avoid, yet it is unavoidable. Death is something that an average human cannot fathom or come to terms with because so many things in this lifetime have been experienced, and we are able to idealize these experiences in our head. Since death is unexplainable and intangible, it is avoided by most. Through grief, however, I have come to understand the beauty in the simplicity of life under the stars— and have found grounding energy from the complexity death pronounces.
I first considered death on December 28, 2017, the day my life inexplicably changed. After several agonizing moments of fear, I realized there were two state troopers knocking on my door at five in the morning. When I opened the door, I received the most crippling news that has ever been delivered to me. I entered a state of shock and my body completely gave out. I could only hear and see white noise, all I remember was staring through the soul of these two state troopers. There was no possible way that it could’ve been my brother who had flipped across the median and was killed, there was just no way. They were not completely sure of identification yet, so while a tiny part of me thought that there was still hope, a large part of me was trying to grasp reality with my two hands.
I realized that my brother was truly gone when I felt like I had physically lost my power to move. I felt an immense amount of pain that surged through every joint in my body, something that was jolting me from side to side, reminding me that the other half of me has died and left this earth forever. Losing a loved one feels like someone cut your body in half— like someone amputated one leg, one arm, one half of your heart, and one ear— then covered you up again, poorly but decently, so that you can just barely smile and move forward with your life.
There is no little girl in this world who expects to plan her big brothers funeral. There is no little girl who expects to have to walk into a showroom of coffins and pick which one her brother will lay in for eternity. No little girl who wants to pick out which color the cloth inside will be. There is no little girl who expects to stand at a podium next to her brother’s open casket in front of hundreds of people and talk about the legacy of her own blood in her most vulnerable and tragic state of being.
These are the moments where I found strength— when I realized that I must go on, even if it meant that I would have days where food looked like cardboard, where people were my worst enemies, and when my number one confidants turned their backs on me because this was just too much for anyone to handle. In my earliest days of grief, I was not able to comprehend the pain that I was going through. A few months later, that a dull pain continued to resonate within me like a slow disease, waiting to consume my entire being. These are the moments where I continued to find strength. It is when most of the people around you forget, as they should, because they have moved on with their own lives. I do not fault anyone for this, as I believe it is only human for others to feel each other’s pain for a small amount of time until retuning their attention to their own emotional state of being, and continue on. As humans, we are neurobiologically connected to each other, which is why we feel pain when someone that we love is also in pain.
The idea of grief is misunderstood in so many ways. I struggled to fully comprehend it myself, as it appears in so many different forms. I never wanted to accept the fact that this is my new reality. While it’s not something that defines who I am as a person, it is something that I must grow and accept with raw emotion, delicately but beautifully. I learned that if I cannot accept this, I too will shatter like glass, epically and tragically.
I had, and occasionally still have, days where I felt like I couldn’t survive this pain, days where getting out of bed seemed too much. Where walking down my own stairs to sit on the couch seemed an unimaginable overexertion. Pain lingered and reminded me how much hurt I could take without actually killing me. I kept tricking my mind into thinking that I was in an out of body state, living in a nightmare that would soon be over, and I could go back to normal and go on with life. I reminded myself that this was a part of my new reality: I could not take too much at one time, and that was okay. I would eventually be okay.
This is when I begun to explore the idea of simplicity since I never cared too much for it in the past. I decided to accept all things beautiful, and reject toxicity. We have the power within to remove ourselves from the bustle of the environments that we endure every single day and give ourselves time to truly breathe and feel the energy of life and the earth that reverberate through the ground we walk on and in the air we breathe. We have the ability to get lost in ourselves and others, exploring the depths of those around us and how they interpret this life.
I have learned through grief that it is ever so important to appreciate those who love me. My brother has guided me onto an open road that has shown me who cares and who does not, and this is one of the simple things that I needed most. What makes up this universe are millions of different pieces of debris that have lived years on end and ended up floating in the space of the stars, making up so much of what is misunderstood and forming conjunctions of solar winds and energies that reflect onto the earth. This debris ultimately connects us to all of the unknowns that we’ve questioned throughout our lifetime; challenging us to try to understand them as whole beings.
I believe that we need to break this debris down and understand them as the small molecules that they actually are, the simple core that makes up everything that is unknown and misunderstood. Furthermore, I have connected these unknowns to people and concepts regarding the heavy contrast between life and death, trying to explain what is beyond us to give us hope of some kind of afterlife beyond the stars. Understanding the beauty of life is crucial to our innermost sanity, especially when dealing with any kind of grief. How can we go on with our lives with little understanding of who we are and what makes up our most idealistic being? I sit back and bring myself to a simplistic arena in my mind. Sitting in a wooden chair on a small porch, overlooking fields of green followed by a lake that reflects the morning glow of the nectar colored sun that awakens the soul of billions of people that reside on this earth. We are all facing the same sun, the same sky, the same moon, but living such drastically different lives.
With strength and empowerment, I find myself able to move forward, with half of me intact, and the other half a bit weary and lost. Studying what simplicity is, and how I can apply it to my everyday actions, I learn how we can ride these waves, understanding that it is not what we have that defines us, but who we have with us and what we can do to bring ourselves into a whist of happiness, despite the tragically beautiful concept of life itself.