Sadness isn't shameful
How to: cope with your neverending grief
Sometimes, mostly at night, I gain a desire to read something so gutwrenchingly sad in order to feel a sense of longing. I love that word, “longing.” The sad times are the best ways to examine love. I started reading Crying in H Mart and I’ve never felt so seen by a book. It shows the reconciliation that the daughter of an immigrant must go through to really see the love from her mother. It’s real and it’s beautiful.
I was a cry baby growing up. I’m deeply serious. I was a cry baby. I cried at almost everything. My parents used to call me Rudolph, because my nose would get so red. I was called a cry baby in elementary school. As I got older, I forced all those feelings down because I hated to be spotted crying. I bottle all those things up inside me until it comes to a point where I can feel no release. Now, it takes a lot for me to cry. When people talk about how much they cried reading Book Lovers or watching Love, Rosie and I did not cry as much in comparison, I feel a little bit broken. Like I’ve missed out on something.
As a kid, I would always say that I was a person with sadness built within. I used to say that in a way that was depressing. I don’t regret it and I certainly don’t take it back. Sadness hurts, but it also provides you moments of reflection on how much other people really mean to you.
Crying in H Mart is so real to me in so many different ways. I don’t talk about it enough but my grandpa died in November. I’ve experienced death before. My Lola (my mom’s mom) died of cancer when I was 6. My aunt died of ALS when I was in high school. I didn’t cry either time, but there was still a deep sadness there. Even when I was 6. A feeling. Like something was missing.
Before my aunt died, I told my therapist at the time that I no longer needed sessions. A week later she died and I asked if I could still continue because I didn’t know how to cope. When my grandpa died, I brought up therapy again to my mom. I already was needing it for other reasons, and I told her that I would like to see a therapist because I was having a hard time processing his death. She said okay but, “that this is just something that happens. People die and we move on.” My mom is really good at burying things and leaving them in the past. I’m not. I dig the grave and place the thing next to the hole waiting for things to get better. Sometimes I place the thing inside the hole but it never gets covered. Moving on is something I need to go through with someone holding my hand.
In Fleabag, there’s an episode where her mom dies. It’s a flashback scene with a conversation between Fleabag and her best friend.
It’s a lovely scene. I used to think “yeah it’s real. It’s beautiful. When you lose someone, you gotta put it somewhere else.” Now, I’m not so sure. When you lose someone you can’t just give someone else the love you had for them. It doesn’t work like that. Love isn’t transferable. Losing someone doesn’t free up your love space for someone else. Love doesn’t have a limit to the amount you can give out. Love is a conversation you create with someone and when that love dies you have to live with the death. You have to keep that loss to create more love.
Maybe it’s just me or maybe I’m just young but what no one tells you in your grief is how much regret you are going to be filled with. Every time someone passed away, I regretted how I acted. When you’re young, you’re a really big asshole to everyone around you but especially your family. I was annoyed and angry and very bad at building relationships with my family. In death, you can’t take all that back. In death, you can’t tell them you’re sorry. I’ve never been very good at sorry’s. Sorry’s is something I hold back and have to spit out, bitter. I told my roommate all this and she said, “I’m sure they know.” Well, now I’ll never know.
Because my grandpa died in the pandemic and because of COVID, I wasn’t able to fly home to his funeral. His death was the first death that wrecked me. It felt like my insides were pulled out and I was the only one seeing it. When my dad got the call, I immediately went to the bathroom to cry so hard I wanted to throw up and then I went home and cried some more. I can’t remember the last time I cried so hard. Probably my first heartbreak, which was my junior year of high school. But the worst part was no one around me was crying, not even my parents.
After dinner, which I barely ate, I made my parents drive me home and when they left, my other roommate sat with me across the room. I was sick with a nasty viral infection and I was crying the hardest in my life. It was the worst time ever to have a broken heart. We then went to the Film Society Club meeting and I watched The Royal Tenenbaums for the first time. It was a movie about family and being bad at it and trying to be better while being bad at it and then a funeral bringing family together. So naturally, I cried some more.
Later, I found out that I was the only cousin who was not able to attend the funeral. Everyone else and my dad and my cousin’s dads went through our grandpa’s stuff and went to the funeral and grabbed what they wanted from him. Hearing that made me cry again. They set up my grandma to fix her bank account from joint to single and make sure she had food and after that weekend she went back to an empty house. Her house is so big. They have a big living room and a hallway of three bedrooms and two bathrooms and a basement. I felt connected to my grandma. I felt like a house too big with not enough bodies to fill it.
My grandpa was a big crier. He cried every time he said goodbye to someone after a visit. I never really knew his exact reason why, but I think I understood. Maybe he had this fear that you wouldn’t know the next time you see someone. Or maybe, he understood how hard goodbyes were. I think that when my grandpa died, some part of him stayed with me, and that part filled me up with overflowing tears. Like a bucket.
I try not to take advantage of my emotions now. I do my best to cry openly, even in public. I tell people when I cry and when they go “aw” I reprimand them because I refuse to feel shame. Even as I write this I cry a little.
Last watched: Stranger Things (Netflix)
Last read: Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Books read: 12/12