Serial Griever: Re-Entering the World

After you lose someone close — someone you weren’t meant to lose for decades — the transition back into the ‘real’ world is excruciating. Up until re-entry, you are immersed in the cocoon of a grieving family, where the people around you know what you have lost because they have lost it, too. 

Georges lost his sister during Covid and so was spared the sudden return to normal life. “I will never forget coming back from the hospital after she had passed, and being there, in front of the Musee d’Orsay, on the banks of the Seine, in a world which seemed to have stopped. I don’t think I could have coped with the brutality of normalcy then. In the past, when one lost somebody, they would go into mourning — wear black, refrain from public events, maybe even stop work if they could. Nowadays, most of the people you encounter after a loss won’t know what you’re going through, they’ll treat you like they would have before. And yet you’re not — your world is not — as before.”

In contrast to Georges, I lost my mother during reading week, right in the middle of third-year deadlines, without time to properly pause and relearn how to breathe. It was a baptism of fire, and I do not recommend it — but somehow being thrown back into life forced me to find a strength that I didn’t know I had. I am still waiting for normalcy to seep back into my life, but for now, I am crafting a new ‘real’ for myself.   

The thing about this weird new planet which we find ourselves rotating on is that we both exist here. If you look past the banks of the Seine you will see the fields which cocoon my grieving family. And in the Musee d’Orsay hang paintings of mothers and sisters, brothers and daughters. We share an understanding of the experience that not a lot of people our age can see yet. And though our losses are distinct, we sit together in this changed world, knowing it as both unfamiliar and deeply our own.

Illustration by Aoife White