Oh, Pep, what a heart-wrenching story! So much loss at such young ages, both for you and those you lost. No wonder you are struggling. I am not sure you know how to grieve anyway when you are so young. I am not saying we ever reach an age when we do know how to grieve, but I feel in my own experience of close losses, that I am learning to deal with it better the older I get. It is still terrible and stressful and hard to recover, but somehow, I feel like I am starting to understand it better; all the tangle of emotions, guilt, misery, isolation, sadness, anger, the tendency to feel irritated and annoyed with others, love and regret and the longing for happier days when they were still here and the horrible reality of not being able to see or speak to them again. It is all so complicated and so hard, but the more of life you see, I think the more you learn to be able to get it into proportion in relation to the world and the rest of your life.
Grief never leaves you; you learn to live with it. You find strategies to fall back on to help you when you are struggling with it. For me it was having flowers around. They cheered me up a bit and reminded me there are still good things in the world and their scent somehow helped me feel better. I walk in the park too and find it helps to sit on a bench there to try to come to terms with all that has happened. Having nature around you helps and the inscriptions on the benches remind me that love never dies and people continue to be remembered and loved by those who knew them. It is a calming and healing place to sit to do that with greenery all around you. But I also try to do something each week that gets me out of the house, makes me think about something else and engage with life again and ensures I have something to look forward to doing.
I am glad the counselling is helping, and I am glad you have posted on this website because talking really helps too and when I came here, what also really helped me was finding that others understand and knew what I was going through. Everyone here has lost someone and has been through and continues to go through this terrible journey, so they will all understand what you are feeling.
There is no right or wrong way to grieve and no timescale for it either. Life goes on and that is one of the hardest things to grasp sometimes. I felt like the world should have stopped and couldn't understand how things could just keep going on as normal around me, when this terrible disaster of the loss of someone I loved so much had occurred. You are left feeling like you are in another universe, removed from everything that is going on around you and that the planet itself should stop and acknowledge the loss; not just you! But of course, that never happens.
You are not alone here, and we will help as best we can, if you feel like posting again. I am sure there are indeed others who have postponed the grieving process like you. Perhaps it is the mind's way of protecting us until we are able and ready to begin to process it. Whatever the reason, I wish you well. Keep at it. You have to express it and allow yourself to feel it sooner or later in order to heal. It may not be a quick process and I think is something we all spend the rest of our lives dealing with to a greater or lesser degree really. There are good days and bad days, better and worse days, but you only have to get through them one at a time and you learn that even on the worst ones, you know that there will be better ones to come, once again. So you have hope.
I find what helps me is to remember that I was lucky to have the person with me while I did and to recognise the treasure of memories they left me and the privilege of knowing them for the time they were here. They left me great memories, some not so great ones too, but they all make us stronger and these special people help make us who we are, so we are their legacy in a way and would not be the same people without having had them in our lives, so in a way, they never leave us, because they are part of us; part of who we are.
The way I see it, those who loved us would still want us to be happy and to have lives that are the best they can be, so, as they are not here to make that happen for us anymore, it is up to us to do it for them and have as good a life as we can, so that, if we ever meet again, we will have lots to tell them and make them proud of us and what we did after they were gone.
Good luck and keep talking.
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