Grief: A Study in Feeling Like an Imposter to My Own Emotions

Trigger Warning: Discussion of death.

I love the act of writing things down, the way it formalises words, the way you can make sure that everything is said exactly as it should be. I struggle to articulate myself in spoken conversations, and subsequently, I have been trying to write this essay since I first found out.

I have been working and reworking these words since the moment I got off the horrible, life-shattering phone call with my mum. The phone call where I found out that my baby sister had died.

It almost feels strange to say it, but through the loss of my sister, I have learned more about myself than I’ve ever been able to before. Even in those first few moments, directly after I hung up the phone, I could feel my heart beating more aggressively in my chest than ever. It was as though I was suddenly painstakingly aware of my own body, inherently focused on the feeling of my blood, coursing through my veins. It was as though every breath that I took in was becoming its own, cruel reminder that I was still painfully and utterly alive. That I was continuing to live. That I was continuing, where my sister could not.

I have always hated feeling out of control. I love the act of organisation, of everything having a place, a solution. It turns out, losing a loved one didn’t change this. Instead, I found myself making the bed, organising all of the sheets and scattered pillows, hanging all of the clothes on hangers. I got dressed, I brushed my hair. I straightened everything that I could, and then I staggered downstairs to sit, alone in my living room, wailing: I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, I don’t know how I’m supposed to act, repeatedly into my hands.

As the eldest sibling, I am used to knowing things. I am used to knowing the exact words needed to de-escalate a fight between me and my brother. I know the exact place to poke my youngest sister to get her to laugh after she’s been crying. I know the exact voice needed to calm a situation down. Essentially, I am predisposed to fixing. It’s not just with siblings, either. My friend’s laugh all the time about how pragmatic I am, how ready I always am to work for a solution, to plan the best way to Sort Things Out. My girlfriend always tells me that I'm always so ready with a solution, sometimes I don't even let her complain for long enough.

Despite this, all of the knowing and fixing in the world doesn’t change death.

In those moments, sitting on the sofa, wringing my hands, I discover that this is what I feel like when I’m completely helpless. This is what I do when I am powerless.

Due to previous plans, my granny was the first person that I saw in person after finding out. Still choking back tears, I told her that my sister was dead, and then felt horrible for being the one to spread such shit news. Felt awful for making her cry, for ruining her day a little.

It wasn’t just that, though. It wasn’t just guilt, but anger as well. Fury, because I had to be the one to tell her. I had to be the one shrinking the world where she was still thought of as alive to just that one person smaller. I still feel angry about this. Find myself debating what to do whenever someone new asks me if I have any brothers or sisters. Find myself tempted to lie, to say: yes, I have four, and they are all healthy and funny and absolutely all of them are alive, just so I can go on pretending for one more day.

Of course, it’s not only keeping her alive that makes me want to do this. I also want to avoid the pity, the awkwardness. I want to avoid the way that people start choking on their words, the way that they say: oh, I’m so sorry, and the nice conversation we were having suddenly becomes tainted. I want to avoid the way I know, in that moment, that their perception of me has changed just slightly. To them, I have suddenly become someone who is mourning. Someone who has lived through tragic circumstances. Someone who is grieving.

I can’t cope with other people knowing these things about me. I can hardly cope with knowing it about myself. The realisation continues to hit me at random moments. I’ll be sitting on the sofa reading, or halfway through a cup of tea, and it will hit me. I’ll think: oh, this is how I behave in the wake of a major tragedy. I feel like I am looking at myself from outside my own life, studying each of my actions. Oh, I think, This is what I’m like when I’m going absolutely fucking out of my mind.

I find myself questioning if I’m actually upset, if I could actually be going through grief in the way I feel like I should be going through grief. Oh, sure, the night before the funeral I cried so hard that I made myself sick. Oh, sure, I’m awake all hours of the night haunting my kitchen corridor like a Victorian ghost. Oh, sure, I ordered Tarot cards off the internet and I’ve been having crazy fucking dreams, but I mean. I’m still functioning, aren’t I? I’m still getting up every day and eating all my meals and brushing my teeth, aren’t I? I am upset, but it is not as constant as it feels like it should be. Not as all encompassing.

I am upset, but I’m still going. Despite all desire to the contrary, I am still going.

Sure, it feels like someone has come into my house and moved everything three inches to the left. Sure, it feels like someone has trampled over a patch of well maintained garden, taken a piece of my soul. Sure, it feels as though something is rotting in me where it was once growing, but am I really that broken? Am I really that worse for wear?

I feel like I’m trying to go at my emotions like they’re mathematical equations. Trying to weigh up my right to cry at the funeral versus other people’s. Do I have as much right to mourn her as my mum? Is my trauma anything when compared to my brother's? Do I, as someone that hasn’t lived in the same city as my sister for three years now, really have the right to miss her?

The logical answer is: of course you do. I know this, really. Know that I was her big sister, I knew the exact point on her neck that made her tense up and laugh loudly. I knew the first song she ever sang. Knew the exact way her face looked before she fell asleep, and before she woke up. I remember the phase she had where she always wore shoes to bed, remember the time I made her laugh so much she had an asthma attack. I remember times she fell over and times she got back up, and times we sat on the sofa and watched TV shows together for hours. The hoodie she wore all the time used to be mine. The room she slept in used to be mine. In so many ways, I helped shape her life, helped shape who she became, and yet, I still catch myself feeling like an imposter to my own sadness. Still catch myself feeling like I don't have the right to truly feel her loss.

Maybe it’s because I can still barely believe it’s real. COVID meant that I wasn't able to go home to see her for ten whole months before she died. So, I have to live with the fact that I got ten months less with her than everybody else did. Ten months less to speak to her, to annoy her, to exist with her.

Sometimes I can trick myself into thinking that I’ll get on a flight back home and she’ll be in the car with mum, waiting to pick me up. I mean, on her phone and pretending to be uninterested in me - but there. I find myself tripping up in thoughts, thinking of her in the present tense, thinking: wow, when I next see her - and then getting hit all over again with a wave of knowledge that I will never next see her.

In my dreams, she gets resurrected, but with a time limit. I sit with her in our garden and know that she’s going to die, but we get to talk. I get to tell her that I love her, that I have always loved her - that I loved her even during the time I locked her in her room because she was annoying me so much. That I loved her even the times that I told her she was a melter, even during that time I threw the bottle of hairdye at her. In my dreams I get to hug her one last time. I get to cry with her, not alone. In my dreams, I get the answers that I so desperately crave.

I don’t need to be a psychologist to understand that I’m trying to give myself closure.

And it’s ridiculous. The whole thing is absurd. I’ve never spent so long trying to figure out if I’m adequately sad enough about something before. Never spent so much time trying to understand if I’m coping well, or incredibly terribly. If I’m functioning fantastically, or if I'm bottling it all up, and actually, I’m going to have a great big breakdown sometime next Thursday.

It frustrates me every time that someone tells me I’m being brave, or strong. I find that it properly fucking winds me up every single time someone says, god, I can’t imagine how you’re feeling or I don’t know how you’re still going. The answer is: I have no fucking idea how I’m still going, but what else can you do? I have no fucking idea what I’m feeling, so please don’t even try to imagine.

I’m not brave, I’m not strong, I’m doing the same thing that every other person who loses someone does: continue.

I am not brave or strong or sad because I want to be, or because I’m trying to be. I am just fucking existing, existing alongside this monster of an event that my tiny human brain can’t even begin to pick apart. I am not the centre of this story, I am just a small fucking cog. I am just the tiny little splinter.

The real event, the real horror, is the fact that my sister has died. She has gone. She has been lost.

My sister, who I have denied a name for throughout this whole essay.

My sister, Hazel.

Hazel is more than my memories of her. More than the ways that I choose to remember her. More than the pictures I print out of her, the videos I have left of her. Hazel was more than any of that. She was funny, and bright, and angry, and annoying and gorgeous and talented and clever and, above everything else, she was alive.