Rest and Rejuvenation Day 6: On Grief

This is probably going to be the hardest blog post I am writing for the month of January. I honestly considered not writing it at all but that didn’t feel good to me. This will probably be super short because I am still working through my feelings about this. In 2020, I lost my maternal grandfather. He has the only grandfather I have ever known since my paternal grandfather died when I was very young. 

Grief is weird in the sense that you don’t think it will impact you. I’d not think that I would lose my grandfather in 2020. He was diabetic and had a lot of other health issues but he always made it through. When he got sick, I was so confident that you would be perfectly fine. I couldn’t imagine a world where she wasn’t there. But that was not meant to be. 

I learned in my grief in 2020 that I have never truly understood my emotions around my immigration. The sounds incredibly weird but immigrating to the United States changed my life in a lot of ways. Many of them were positive but I didn’t realize how many of those ways were negative. Or, better stated, how they negatively impacted me. One of those Waze was the fact that we did not get to see family in India often. This of course limited my ability to have strong bonds with them. At the end of the day, they are my family and I love them and they love me, but I learned that there is such a difference. 

For me, I had to really work through The moments in my life that I did not get to share with him in person. I am so thankful that I visited him in 2019 because it ended up being the last time I saw him in person. Some part of me was so angry that I hadn’t seen him in 15 years in person. Even though 99% of the reason behind not going for so long we’re out of my control. Another part of me wondered if I could actually feel so much grief for a person I didn’t get to see in person often. My grief has really forced me to reevaluate how I view my relationships and the worth they have. He was my grandfather and my grief is valid no matter what form it comes in. 

As I am currently struggling to write more in this post, I am simply going to end it here. In 2021 I really want to work do you understand my grief about the situation more.