High school is the age where students have built up a fantasy about the perfect life. You get a license, drive a fancy car, have loads of friends, and the perfect relationship that you strut the hallways with. You are at your “prime” when you are 16 or 17, an age every adult talks about wanting to come back to. You can pretend to be the main character in a movie for once, but what happens if that high school fantasy was nothing more than a fantasy? The soundtrack comes to a screeching halt in the movie of your life when you lose someone, almost losing that person feels like losing yourself as well.
“When you lose someone, it is insanely difficult, because you have to adjust to them not being in your life anymore,” senior Sydney Davis said.
According to the American Psychological Association, grief is defined as: “the anguish experienced after significant loss.” It’s the unexplainable feeling of losing a person close to you, almost in denial that they are truly gone. Grief cannot be put into a paragraph of words or a Google definition to fully sum up every emotion that grief houses. When you lose someone, especially at an early age, it’s difficult to grasp what to do. Like your world is spinning and you don’t know how to stop it or which direction to go. The simple act of breathing becomes foreign to your body. But grief isn’t always negative. It is okay to grieve, be sad or not even react at all. This sadness is a gift because it means you loved someone when you miss them.
“This is all of the unexpressed love, the grief that will remain with us until we pass because we never get enough time with each other, no matter whether someone lives until 60 or 15 or 99,” actor Andrew Garfield said at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “I hope this grief stays with me because it’s all of the unexpressed love that I didn’t get to tell [my mom].”
In high school, it is difficult to come to terms with the reality that when you lose someone, it’s real. Classes keep flowing, and everyone around you is laughing and acting perfectly normal, whereas you are just paralyzed in time, waiting for someone to notice and your life to move forward. But in this period of disoriented emotions, you have to realize that life is sacred and life is short. No one is meant to do life alone and we have to be here as much as possible with one another, holding on as tight as we can, finding peace with each hardship. Each loss is a lesson in disguise.
“We are at an age where everyone is so judgemental, so it’s hard to reach out to someone when you don’t know how they will react,” junior Victoria Mock said. “Everyone takes grief differently.”
In today’s society, vulnerability isn’t as normalized as it should be. Even crying in front of your close friends can be seen as embarrassing or provoke a habitual fear that lives inside teenagers of being judged for being different. Being vulnerable also includes the opening to therapy. While therapy is beginning to become more normalized than in the past, there are still astigmatisms with therapy and how it is viewed in the high school realm.
“Bring around therapy, people think you’re weak,” Mock said. “In reality, anyone can go get help and everyone needs someone to talk to.”
While some wallow and mourn by looking at the blank spot of the wall in their room, or listening to the same sad playlist over and over, there isn’t a “right” way to grieve. Losing someone or even if your parents are getting separated, changes your life and can feel like the earth is crumbling down beneath you and you don’t remember how to run. Some beneficial solutions that you could adopt to your daily routine of moving on is letting yourself cry. This sounds contradicting, but letting yourself release the pent-up emotions can allow you to find peace within yourself. Secondly, don’t compare your grief to others. Everyone has a different life and a different story, don’t let yourself get lost in the pages of your peers. Lastly, forgive yourself for all the things you did or didn’t say or do. The only path to peace is forgiveness. While you do have to move on with your life, you don’t have to trash every memory with your loved one. You can carry them in your heart while healing and moving on with your life.
“[Losing someone] is like the concept of phantom pain. Whenever someone loses an arm, they can still feel their arm even though it’s not physically there,” Davis said. “Except in this case, emotional loss not physical.”
Grief is in no way linear. The wound of losing someone can bleed for years, but there’s beauty in pain, knowing that you had a true, valuable relationship with your loved one to have grieved so deeply at their loss. Vulnerability truly is your superpower. Harness it and don’t be afraid to share it, because true authenticity never repeals the right people.
“What we have once enjoyed, we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us,” Helen Keller said.
