The Sixth Stage Of Grief
(Yes, there is another one)
Time began to crawl as my mind spiraled. I should have been in the car with them. Why didn't I convince them to stay? Why did God spare my life and take them away?
Femi will never learn how to drive, he won't fall in love, he won't graduate from medical school, he will never be a doctor, and he won't buy her the house he wanted to get for her. My mother will never know what it is to be a grandmother. She will never witness the convocation of her children. She will never go for her master, She will never reap the benefit of motherhood. She would not complete and sleep in the house that she was building. She will die as a tenant.
In those moments, I wished myself to die. I do not want to be here. I need to be with them.
I wailed like a toddler in need of the mother’s breast. How am I bereft in an almost unimaginable way? For the first time, I understood why they said, death is about the living and not the dead because let’s face it, they are dead and gone; immune to the emotions and troubles of the world, while the living are left with all the memories (good, bad, and gray) and the emotions. The core attribute of being a human is our ability to feel, to experience all and every emotion.
The people around me debated how outlandish my life was and how they wouldn’t have survived it. “I would have killed myself,” one said, “I cannot even imagine this being my mother and my brother”, another one said.
In the minutes and hours that followed, I cursed my fate and willed myself to die.
They spoke of the stages of grief as something that happens in sequence, like, you can only be depressed after you have experienced anger, but at the moment, being faced with the reality of grief and not the idea of what it was supposed to be, I realized that you can experience all that and more in a twinkle of an eye, and then slowly and harshly. I also found out that there is a sixth stage of grief that you can only find out if you have experienced it for yourself- it is called reality. After accepting your loss, you will be thrown into the harsh reality of life with grief (life after death), in a few months, people will move on and they will expect the same from you. This reality will come in different shapes, sizes, and forms. You will, finally, face your mortality if you have been hiding from it. You will be at peace with it and when you want to discuss it with people in a religious country like Nigeria, where it is a forbidden topic, you will be struck with another reality of life after death, like a thunder.
People will tell you sorry like it is the solution to the injury in your soul, and not merely a balm.
My soul broke into pieces and in unrecognizable ways. How can they be gone? Why did this happen all at once, and in the most bizarre way? Why me of all people? What did I do to deserve this? How is it justifiable for one person to go through all these? Why them? How is this fair to us?
I had loads of questions like a supervisor interviewing a PhD candidate.
I was desperate for answers and that’s why it hurt when not only did I not get any answer, but I was told “You cannot question God. He is unquestionable”, those words were like endometriosis cramps; the pain is almost indescribable yet painful beyond human comprehension.
What do you mean that God is unquestionable? How am I supposed to believe in someone who takes and takes from me and subjects me to inhumane pain, but I am forbidden from questioning him? I cannot even ask to know why he is putting me through this. I cannot ask why he just takes them without giving them a chance to enjoy their labor under the sun.
I got more frustrated when someone said “he gives and he takes”. If he will take it without explanation, then why bother to give, anyway?
Whether you believe that life is just one big bowl of coincidences or there is truly a God somewhere, the reality of life after death will hunt you.
I had so many existential questions- I want to know why. What’s the purpose of being here, anyway? Whose idea was it? What exactly is justice and fairness?
In the weeks that followed, the pain was more excruciating. Then the months came, and the pain was unbearable. The years started to cripple in, and the pain was brash, brutal, but this time, they were tolerable.
I live with my pain, every second of every day. The reality of life after death is the knowledge that multiple things can coexist at the same time. Your heart can hold so much pain whilst giving room for joy, empathy, etc.
Grief does not stop at your acceptance of what has happened to you. There are waves of reality that you will come to know and live with as time goes.
