it is then that i miss you

{oftentimes we say goodbye to the person we love without wanting to. though that doesn't mean that we've stopped loving them or we've stopped to care. sometimes goodbye is just a painful way to say i love you} anon

let me share my story with you... 

i sat in a darkened space and let the salt air push against me.

it sounded like floodwaters in my ears; relentlessly refreshing. 

The wind whistled beside me, a chime tolling through the night.

i moved toward the edge of the sea, buffeted and broken. 

releasing promises and potential like an unraveling string. 

i called out for answers but all that came was silence.

when the sand shifts over the shore like fog and i feel it's sting. 

it's then that i miss you.

:: words by clare hubbard ::

i'm going to be blatantly honest as I always aim to be on here. i grieve every day for someone who is not in my life anymore, my father.

how do you work through grief when it's for someone who is still alive? how does it resolve when you have more questions than answers? how do you move on when things are still broken?

i want to share it on here because i know i am not the only one, and never aim to appear like that. there are people grieving for very real losses but also for those people/scenarios/relationships that may not seem significant out in the open {to people going about their everyday life} but have a great effect for them every day.

{the bereaved in these situations may not be grieving the actual loss of physical life but of crucial intangibles, without which their lives and families will never be the same. grief is grief, despite the fact that each of us will experience it in highly individual ways depending on personality and circumstance.} from here

grief is an agonising place, like a hollow funnel that pours pain into every facet of your life and takes away the joy of the now. it can be an exhausting struggle to mute the wounds and dispel the emptiness, to find strength to move on without someone who mattered. and in this instance i am focusing on the struggle that occurs when you feel guilty or banished from grief.

i haven't always been so open or willing to talk about this whole thing at all. shame is a pretty great stifler of expression. i am also very aware that i am a member of a close & extended family and don't want to expose anything that maybe hurtful.

but i hold strongly to the truth that we can all help each other along, even when one of us stumbles or is stinging from all the sand being blown around. what is pushing me through right now is writing it out, it's the key for me really. just getting it out; the painful words, the hopeful words and the bruised words need to be pulled out of me. it helps a whole lot, sometimes i read back what i have written and it feels like i didn't even write it, such a weird feeling.

what also helps is understanding what disenfranchised grief is {woah, what a word! sorry i didn't pre-warn you with that one}. it is helping me to accept the grief that needs to be released and that i can grieve about this and not bottle it up. there are lots of daughters and sons of parents who are absent, who leave and never come back. and that's considerably relieving to know too. just last week i was really wanting to find someone that was like me, and i did. i was reading her blog and it was incredibly empowering to see her strength and brokenness through a very similar situation. i reached out to her and it was great to connect about a very raw and real thing.

it's his birthday today. so here goes, happy birthday dad... i wish it could be different and i miss you x