It’s been a year since my first (and only) blog post. Over the past 12 months, I sat down to write something new roughly 200 times, but the words were never there. Turns out, I was not as far along as I thought on my healing journey, and I needed a bit more time before I was ready to turn any thoughts or emotions into words.

If you’ve ever watched your arrival time get later and later on Google Maps while sitting powerlessly in traffic, then you know how I’ve been feeling over this past year. Every time I thought I had made some progress, I’d glance down at my arrival time, only to find out that I was just as far from my destination as I was when I started. It was frustrating and, at times, demoralizing.

It took me another whole year, which now marks 2 since my sister’s death, to realize that there is no destination on this healing journey – there is only the journey itself. The destination I was searching for was simply an arbitrary ‘finish line’ that I created in my head — something for me to metaphorically ‘cross’ so that I could say, “That’s it! I’m done, I’m all healed! My sister’s death did not ruin me!”

And since I’ll likely be on this journey of healing and navigating life after loss forever, I’ve done a lot of research and reflection on grief. In case you’re not familiar with some of the most common metaphors and frameworks that experts use when they talk about navigating loss, I’ll hit you with some of the highlights:

First and foremost, psychologists have mostly debunked the ‘five stages of grief’. I’m going to skip right over that.

Some people say grief is a big rock that you carry around in a backpack. The rock doesn’t get any smaller or lighter, and you never get to put it down, but you get stronger each day that you carry it, so it doesn’t feel as heavy over time. I have no issues with this framework, but I also don’t personally love the idea of carrying a rock around forever.

Some people say grief is just love that has no where to go. It’s a sweet sentiment, but in my mind, my love for my sister finds her wherever she is.

There are also a myriad of water-based metaphors: grief as an ocean, grief as a riptide, grief as a river. All of these come with their own set of rules and guidance: learning to float instead of always treading water, swimming sideways instead of fighting directly against a strong current, trusting that the river will ebb and flow to move around obstacles that pop up in its path. These metaphors remind us to stop running from our pain, to think creatively about the ways that we cope and care for ourselves, and to trust that while life may not look exactly as we’d planned, it will go on. Again, I have no problem with these sentiments, but they still didn’t sit right with me.

My dear friend introduced me to the metaphor that most closely resembled my own feelings: grief as a club. She lost her father a few years before I lost my sister, and after Alex died, I apologized to her for not being present enough when her dad passed. I didn’t check in enough, I didn’t do enough, and I was ashamed of myself for not realizing it until I experienced my own devastating loss. She was so gracious and said, “Oh Michaela, don’t even go there – you just didn’t know. Very few people truly know what to do until they’re in the club. I’m sorry that you’re in the club now.”

Grief as a club. This was something I could get behind – both because it involved community with other people, and because it finally addressed the sentiment that had been bubbling up in me for weeks that I’d been unable to find words for: once this thing happens to you, you know something that people outside the club don’t know. You have something that people outside the club don’t have. Not in a superior or elitist way – actually quite the opposite, as none of us want to know or have this thing – but in a way that clarifies why you will be forever changed.

And let me add a disclaimer here that when you experience loss or severe pain, you will be forever changed in one million ways and for one million reasons. I’m about to boil those down into one sentiment in case it’s helpful, but please do not let this minimize the gravity of what you’ve experienced. I hope that makes sense.

So, as an extension of the grief as a club metaphor, I present to you the framework that has transformed my experience with loss:

Grief as a receipt.

I’ll give you the tagline up front: loss is the price we pay for love, plain and simple. It is the inevitable end to every love story, long after the words ‘happily ever after’, and it is the inevitable conclusion to every single relationship in our lives. Maybe if we’re super lucky, we’ll all live to be 150 and die peacefully at the same time as every single person we know and love in an apocalyptic event, but putting that hope aside, one person in every relationship loses the other.

And sure, we all logically know this, and some of us (like me, circa 2022) even think we are so keenly aware of it and anxious about it that we’ll be prepared when it happens. But trust me on this one: when you experience it, it goes from something you know in your brain to something you know in your bones — in your soul. And once we know in our soul that loss is the price we will pay for loving someone, we have a choice to make: we can choose to close up our hearts and turn to stone, or we can choose to keep loving people deeply and wildly, accepting the risk of losing them with a bravery that you can only possess as a member of the club.

I consider grief, then, to be the receipt we carry to show the world that we know the price of love, and we’ve paid it. We carry the receipt with us every single day. We carry it into new and existing relationships as proof that we know the risks — we know how the story ends — but we’re choosing to love anyway. We’re choosing to live with our hearts wide open, come what may, because we know that even though it’s going to hurt like hell, it will be worth it. It will make us fully human – fully alive.

And here’s the best part: by making this brave choice, whether it is made with a bold or a trembling bravery, we teach others to live with their hearts wide open as well. We teach them how to be fully alive. And most importantly, we teach ourselves and others how to unlock the true power of the human experience: to know that this is all temporary, and to throw ourselves wildly at it anyway.

All that said, I welcome all of you to the Dead Sibling Society. Whether you’ve lost a sibling, a parent, a child, a spouse, or any friend or family member, I (with sorrow) welcome you to the club. And if you’ve not experienced the loss of a person but rather more generalized loss or pain, I welcome you to the club as well. Or maybe you’re simply here to learn alongside us – I welcome you, too. I wish none of you were here. I wish you didn’t know what you know. But you are, and you do, and someone has to be there to greet you, so here I am. But instead of telling you to keep carrying your rock, or learn to float, or swim sideways, or prioritize self care, I’m going to give you new instructions:

Let yourself be cracked open and ripped apart by the pain. Let all of your insides spill out onto the floor. Take stock of what’s in there. And then, slowly, whenever you’re ready, with trembling hands, start to stitch yourself back up, using only the pieces you really love. When you’re done, there will be holes and empty spaces leftover from the pieces you left behind. Build new pieces there. Keep throwing yourself wildly into life and love. And don’t forget to take your receipt. You earned it.

Repeat as many times as necessary.

Love you,

M