One Year.

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing." - C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed.

In C.S. Lewis' a grief observed, he writes through his dealings with the death of his wife Helen,  of whom he only refers to as "H" throughout the book, I'm assuming because even writing the name of his passed wife rips open the wound each time. 

 

It's been one whole year since Jared Nagel died. And today feels like the weirdest day. Yesterday was the actual year mark, but today feels even more off than yesterday did to me. I feel like I'm in a weird rut. . . and I can't talk my way out of it, or explain why I'm feeling the way I am. . . 

I remember my family was watching the movie King of California when I got a call from my friend Jessica. Being as she isn't even in Oregon anymore, I was so excited to see that I was getting a call from her. I went in to my room, and answered excitedly. She wasn't anywhere near as enthusiastic, and I asked what was going on. 

"Jared had an accident. . . " I knew Jared to be a crazy kid, so his having an accident wasn't exactly shocking news. I thought it was just like any of the other times before. Not that I ever got calls about them, though. I asked if he was alright. 

"He's dead, Ali." 

I sat in my room for about 20 minutes just staring at my wall. Not thinking. Just sitting. Staring. I went into the living room, and I looked at Chaz sitting on the couch. I tried to tell him that Jared had died, but before I could even get the sentence out, the tears finally came. I was bawling and couldn't stop. I called my friend Kristin and asked if I could stay the night at her house. I didn't want to be alone, and for some odd reason, I didn't really want to be in my house either. I cried most of the night and couldn't sleep the rest of it. 

Now the strangest thing in the midst of all of this, is that something inside of me always makes me feel guilty for grieving. Guilty. There's something in me that always feels like a phony; I wasn't his best friend, I wasn't as close to him as, say, Chaz or Paige or Lucas or Beth or Jessica. . . they surely have a right to be torn-up about this. I don't. But that doesn't make it go away. If anything, this false-conviction leaves me even more tangled trying to deal with grief and a twisted feeling of being unworthy to be so upset from losing Jared. I still confuse myself. I feel like I'm in that place again, with it being a whole year since Jared has died. I feel the sadness and the emptiness. And I also feel like this is somehow not ok for me to feel this way. That the people who should be feeling this way are his family and his best friends. Not me. Why does the enemy always have to torment me?!