Maame

by Jessica George

I can’t comprehend living to work, but then I’m afraid of working just to live.

For some reason, at night, when you’re meant to be sleeping, your brain wants answers to everything.

It’s an ordinary week within the most extraordinary circumstances because apparently—and this is what everyone fails to mention about the grieving process—I still have to live.

“We all grieve in

different ways, you know?” she adds.

“Losing someone is universal, but I think that’s about it, really. The r...

How do you know if you’re genuinely happy or if you’re just mostly

all right, with sprinkles of laughter and occasional shit storms of sadness? Maybe I’ve only ever been all right.”

maybe that’s happiness: a lack of tragedy.

A person’s troubles are not measured by the size of those troubles, but by how much they weigh on the individual carrying them.

I used to believe that if someone loved you, they had to say it, otherwise it wasn’t real, it wasn’t known, but I understand now that’s not the case. My dad rarely said those special three words, whether due to his upbringing, his stoic generation, whatever, but I always knew, inexplicably, that he did.

But you’re not supposed to ‘get over’ someone dying,” he says, “especially someone you loved, and your feelings of guilt may not be justified, but they are natural. Thing is, you don’t ever go back, Maddie, to life before, and my advice is to accept that. To accept that you’re not the same person you were when your dad was alive and you can’t be again. Accept that your life is different now because of this monumental, irreversible change and that it’s okay to feel guilty one day and indescribable happiness another. This is life now,” he says. “This is how you live.”

Having lost someone doesn’t mean you understand what it’s like when someone else grieves.”