[candy_coated_bitch]

I've also been thinking a lot about April and grief lately. I don't have a lot of experience with the death of people in my life. Which makes me incredibly lucky in many ways. And though I have a lot of experience in grieving various kinds of losses--when it comes to the death of family members I just don't. This April marks one year since the passing of my grandmother. It wasn't sudden. It wasn't a shock. But it is a very heavy and complicated loss for me.

At the time, I didn't feel very much. I only cried twice and the tears were brief. I never once experienced a crying jag or huge, body wracking sobs. Just numbness. I cried when I saw my sister at the funeral home for my grandmother's wake, and I cried for my mom at the graveside service because I had never seen my mother in so much pain. I didn't cry for myself. I would have given my right arm to be able to feel something then. It was so frustrating. I felt gagged and suffocated and there was also some shame there for not being able to "really" cry or to feel things the "right" way.

Well, this April I am feeling. It seems like everyone else in the family is sad, but I am now wracked with grief. I am the one sobbing and freaking out and everything I felt stuffed with last year that wouldn't come out is releasing. Which is good, of course. But it's also incredibly painful. I've had to stop writing this post twice to cry my eyes out.

I feel enormous guilt over not seeing her enough in the last years of her life. (Though I happen to have an amazing last memory of her that I share with both my sister and my mom.) I feel guilty that I never got to her in time in the end. I still feel some guilt over her fall that led to the decline in her health, even though every rational part of me knows I couldn't have prevented it.

I don't even really know what I'm writing anymore. I don't really know how to grieve; I especially don't know how to grieve a year "late" when everyone else in my life seems to have moved beyond the place that I am in.