A Note on Grief by Meg Bodnar

Grief. It looks so many different ways. It feels so different in every moment, for every person. It isn’t just death that people grieve over. I grieved when I had to re-home one of my pets, Ruth. I grieved when I moved from Tennessee to Georgia. I grieved when my first relationship ended. 

I’ve noticed recently that I haven’t been able to grieve how my body wants to. A little over a year ago, I lost two dear friends in a car accident. Their names were Grayson and Ray. Grayson was the most caring, understanding, and real person I had ever met up to that point in my life. He changed my way of looking at my life; just by being himself, he encouraged me to not take myself so seriously. He taught me how to love. I still remember the first time we held hands; my body was filled to the brim with butterflies. Ray was one of Grayson’s close friends, and that’s how I met him. Ray was somebody I could talk to about anything, and he shared so beautifully and authentically. Ray’s smile and wit are what stick with me to this day. Gray and Ray were the first people in my life who made me feel OK to be fully me, and they reminded me that often. And when they died, I was working three jobs and in school full time at UGA. The next day was my first biology exam; I remember having to sit in an empty study room crying until right before the exam. Then I got up, I sucked it up, set it aside, and took a biology exam. I had shit that I felt like I had to do. I couldn’t even afford to go back home to Tennessee to grieve with their friends and family. It felt like I had failed Grayson and Ray. It felt like I had failed to make them a priority. But I was not the one that was failing others, I had been failed by capitalism.

I was expected to be at work after having two days off. I had just lost a dear friend and my first real boyfriend-- my first love. Two. Fucking. Days. The way that capitalism has shaped my grief is baffling. It has successfully made it impossible to grieve in a way that feels authentic and healing. Capitalism FAILED me. It made me feel shame and guilt for making time to grieve. I was left with no resources; capitalism held me in a broken state and profited off of that. It’s hard to imagine what my grief would have looked like had I been supported in the way I needed; I needed time, space, and understanding from my employers. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so guilty and shameful for needing those things. Maybe I wouldn’t have pulled away so hard from the support I did have from friends and family. I felt that it was dangerous to grieve. I didn’t know how much time it would take or how much energy it would require, and I never found out. I never had the opportunity to follow that feeling to really feel my grief. 

I wasn’t able to go home for two more months. I was lucky enough to have a wonderful community of people here in Athens, but it wasn’t the same as grieving with those who were grieving over the same thing I was. My mental health plummeted, and I was unable to do much of anything besides work. Every day felt the same. I woke up from a nightmare about the car accident, I cried, I bottled that all up to go to work, and then I came home to school work. I had no space to grieve, and that made the process harder. The inability to properly grieve made it heavier and near impossible. 

To this day, I feel that hesitation to grieve. And I don’t think that grief ever leaves. I think there’s always going to be a little bit of grief somewhere in my body, and it shifts and changes constantly. In this moment, writing these words, sharing my experience, I feel sad and broken all over again. I feel the holes in my heart where Grayson and Ray were. The shame, guilt, and fear I feel to grieve is also there; in that way, I have no way of tending to my grief because I can’t even see it clearly. It feels fogged up by negative feelings toward grief. Capitalism has ingrained in each and every one of us that our time is money, and that time spent away from that is selfish and worthless. It is not meant to support our emotional or physical wellbeing; the goal is to make money off of us. What is different now is that I’m figuring out what works for me. A few times a week, I pull out all my pictures and items that remind me of them, and I talk to them. I turn on the songs we used to listen to together, and I tell them about everything I can think of until there’s nothing left to say. I share about my day, new music I think they’d like, what’s bothering me, how much I love my work, crushes, heartbreak, everything. During this time I turn off my phone, put away my laptop, and just sit with them. I cry, I laugh, and I feel connected. I feel reconnected to not only them, but my grief for their loss. This is my way of taking the time for them that I felt like I couldn’t do before. Grayson and Ray deserve it, and so do I.