No One Can Tell You How To Grieve

I follow a few people who have lost children, and a few other people that are in depths of grieve.

I suppose in some way it finds you.

You are part of a club, that you never wanted to be included in but a club no matter what.

One thing that I have seen a lot of recently and something I have been thinking about a lot recently is the fact that you can’t be told how to grieve.

Grief is such a personal thing.

It’s such a hard thing.

No one does it perfectly.

There is no wrong or right way to grieve.

There is no timeline.

There is no book you should follow, there are many books out there but there is none that should be followed.

It is unique to you and you alone.

Mr L and I lost our baby girl.

Our daughter died.

However we grieve her so differently.

So differently that it has caused many rows in the past.

So differently that we have said such hurtful things to each other about our grief before.

But it doesn’t mean we grieve her any less than the other one.

That I have the authority on the grief, or he grieves her more.

We just do it differently.

It’s a really hard thing to understand as parents.

As parents you may start off with different ideas for parenting but once you have kids and once your kids start to grow your parenting styles gel together, the two of you parent as a team.

Then as parents you loose a child and your grief doesn’t gel together.

Grief is personal.

It remains personal.

It doesn’t become a unit of the two parents.

You both do it differently.

But right for you both.

And it is so hard to understand.

He doesn’t talk, I talk and write about her all the time.

Both OK, both right for us, but so not the same.

I can’t tell him how to grieve Rhianna, he can’t tell me how to grieve Rhianna.

And no one else can tell us how we should feel.

No one understands your journey with grief like you do.

No one.

We have five members of our family.

And we have four people grieving for one person in very different, yet completely right for them, ways.

Sometimes it works.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

But no one else outside of us shall tell us when or how we should grieve for our daughter and sister.

Grief is hard.

It never goes away.

It never disappears.

There’s never a wrong way.

There’s never a right way.

There’s just your own way!