It’s been 4 months and I haven’t written a single poem or at least a 300 word essay to acknowledge the passing of my friend, Vweta. I avoid thinking of a tribute to her. When I think of a tribute, it feels like a formal farewell to an informal friendship and I just can't get myself to do it.
After the news of her demise broke, I did not hold the grief in like the media often portray. I wasn’t in shock, I was broken. I wept, and wept so badly I had cramps. I had fever from weeping. Alone with my grief too far from any of our mutual friends or her family, I felt the pain deeply, it was first physical and then, mentally or whatever phase my mind decided was necessary to keep me sane.
No one really learns how to grieve until it is time to grieve. Loss is personal, no matter how many people share that loss with you, you are still alone in your feeling, grasping at the vacuum your brain keeps communicating to you.
Vweta’s passing was a blow to my denial of death. Faraway in London, I nearly cursed humanity for our limitations to time and space. I wanted to see her, to hold her for the last time or just probably will her back to life, if only I could touch her. My mind was racing around in my tiny room, trying to reach her immediate family. By the time I contacted her sister to confirm this was actually real, my brain was already on autopilot. My body was foreign to me, I was in a trance of pain for days afterwards. I just couldn’t explain how my body functioned.
This is in deed not a tribute to my friend Vweta, as you can see. I woke up today and watched the sun climb over my window. I felt it was a sane day to revisit how I felt. As much as I talk to her everyday and find response in her poems, I still do not know how to write a poem to her. She was a beautiful Poet who loved poems so much. She would love that I write her one, I know this, but it feels like the moment I write to acknowledge her death in a language she loves, it makes it final, like I am ready to move on from her existence. I don’t want to do that. I really do not want my mind to take on a next phase of post-Vweta.
Sometimes, I feel like my grief is unreal too. I don’t know if that is normal. I feel like my mind is only tricking me that I am grieving and in actual fact I am not. I really can’t google how best to grieve cause I am supposed to know. But I really don’t know. I really just don’t know how to accept that a death is as real as a birth.
Why do we die?
