Even with my father and brother dying, I didn't quite process the grief.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The weird thing about grief, for me at least, was when each of my parents died, for a year or two afterwards I was pretty wildly brave - just willing to take life on.
Upon the death of my father, our family and myself were emotionally and financially exhausted.
I wasn't prepared for the fact that grief is so unpredictable. It wasn't just sadness, and it wasn't linear. Somehow I'd thought that the first days would be the worst and then it would get steadily better - like getting over the flu. That's not how it was.
The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.
I didn't realize I was still grieving for my father at 30-something.
Three days after my brother died, my father was in the hospital. He just did not want to live anymore. Before, he was fighting and loving life.
As a child I had dealt with a lot of loss and grief. I was constantly losing my parents, losing my home, constantly moving around, living with this stranger, that stepfather, or whatever.
When I had to bury my child, I probably didn't start grieving until a year and a half later.
Such is my experience - not that I ever mourned the loss of a child, but that I consider myself as lost!
I never really had to deal with a death in the family, let alone my brother.