Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Hello lovelies,

I hope June is treating you well. I wanted to talk about grief today. This is a particularly vulnerable piece for me to write for many reasons. However, I think it’s necessary. I have lived a life closely acquainted with grief in many forms. Loss is nothing new to me, and something that has been close to me for years. My first encounter with the grief that comes from a loved one passing away happened when I was very young.

I was a young girl trying to survive in a refugee camp after my apartment building burned down. I didn’t understand much, but all I knew was that I had a home one day and the next I had a tent in the middle of a dust-covered wilderness. I found comfort terrorizing the camp with my antics and my best friend, Maua. We floated around the camp searching for food and entertainment, while constantly being scolded in Swahili by the adults. We were thick as thieves. One of my earliest memories consists of us grabbing a metal trash can, turning it over, and beating out melodies while we sang in Swahili. “Songa Ugali! Tule!” As I get older, my earlier memories fade and get blurry. But I remember the night I stopped speaking Swahili. I wish I could tell you what the day was like before that night. But there is nothing but a blank space when I try to conjure up any details from the morning and afternoon. My mom and I had retired into our tent. One moment I was sleeping, and then the next moment I heard screaming. In short, Maua died that night, in a fire, her tent a few hundred feet from ours.

And for years, I could hear her screams as vividly as I could hear my breath. A constant ringing, I thought was normal until my first counseling session at 14. What grief looked like for my first death was violence. It felt like a decade-long out-of-body experience. Grief sounded like the cacophony of silence, where Swahili used to sing. It looked like my mind shutting down any associations with that day. I lost my smile, my voice, and my innocence. It tasted like a bitter understanding of reality. An understanding that I was not a regular child with a regular life, who could play with her best friend and think nothing of what was to come. It tasted like the bitter reality of what it meant to live in a refugee camp. It was, unfortunately and fortunately, the wakeup call I would need to armor myself for the years ahead. In particular, grief looked like the violence of losing my language, and for a period of time, the violence of losing my voice. For months after Maua’s death, I wouldn’t and couldn’t speak. My body, young and grieved. Trying to come to terms with the violence of death and the bitterness of the life I was dealt. Eventually, my voice healed, but my language fractured into the abyss of my mind. When spoken to in Swahili, I understood clearly, but when it was time to respond, my brain fragmented as it tried to piece together a language that I had called my own. Suddenly, my throat would squeeze up with panic, my mind would blank, and my breath would leave me rapidly. I never got it back.

My second encounter with grief came more than a decade later. When I first arrived in the United States, I struggled with resettling. The food, the accents, the new environment, the safety, the quiet, and the space were all disconcerting. When I went to school, I was distinctly aware that I sounded and acted a lot different than my peers. Adrianna took me under her arm and became my best friend. I know deeply that I wouldn’t be the person I am without her guidance during those first years. Even as we went our separate ways for middle school, our families remained in touch, and we kept up the sleepovers. The first semester of my senior year of high school was filled with applications to many colleges. I had just gotten news that I didn’t match to my top college on Questbridge, and I was devastated. I went to school the next day and complained to Adrianna about the upcoming finals week and the stress of college applications and decisions. That was the last time I ever spoke to her. This grief looked like silence. When the news hit me, something denoted, and I couldn’t quite understand what was going on. None of it felt real, and my brain spent so much time trying to come up with ways that it was fake, ways that I had misread the article, and ways that she was still alive.

Grief was silent in this season. It looked like me showing up for my birthday dinner a week later. Turning in 17 applications in the week that followed that. It looked like hugging my friends and offering them a space to process their grief. But it also looked like missed assignments that were slowly piling up, and teachers that gave me excessive grace because it was so “unlike me.” It also looked like opening college decisions in apathy, making my choice in anxiety, and peace being a transient thing. Grief looked like wearing it well on the outside for months. Only the walls of my bedroom knew the agony that I was in. The nights, almost every night, when I would do my best to quiet my sobs. Grief looked like the deep bags that sat under my eyes because anxiety wouldn’t let me sleep. It culminated months later when I stepped foot on campus. I was having the best time of my life, and also simultaneously fracturing. All of a sudden, I descended quickly, and by the end of the semester, what had started as me seeking spiritual counseling for my faith turned into meeting with a grief counselor and a therapist.

Grief has ravaged me in many ways at many times, but these two moments have been especially marking for me. In the midst of the grief, it feels impossible to consider light and hope. It seems as if grief will be your new permanent home. I can say with confidence that grief doesn’t truly ever go away. Like my high school counselor wisely said: “It will come in waves.” In the beginning, it will feel like a torrent, a tsunami of endless waves crashing against you. But it will ebb out and crash less frequently. You can never predict when it will hit you. Sometimes, it will be an obvious trigger. Other times, it will be much more subtle. It won’t always be just sad things that trigger you, not just the song you both listened to, or the tacos you once loved; sometimes it will be experiencing something you’ve never done before, and wishing they were there experiencing it with you too. Grief will take on many shapes and sizes, but it will be grief nonetheless.

If I could advise past me, or anyone in grief, I would say one thing. Feel it. Feel every ache and every tear in your heart. Process all the feelings that come with it, the sadness, the rage, the ugliness of death and loss. Don’t suppress it at all. Feel it in all its agony and wretchedness. And when you are comfortable, if you ever feel comfortable, I want you to share it with someone. Allow someone to hold your heartbreak with you. Don’t traverse the road of grief alone. It is so freeing to be seen in agony and to be accompanied in the journey, to be heard and held. To be seen and understood. If you are grieving anything in this season, big or small, whether it’s the loss of a loved one, or the fading of a friendship, or a dream you had to give up, or an opportunity you desperately wanted and didn’t receive. Feel it, process it, and share it. And please know that you are never alone, and this too shall pass.