*Content warning: Addiction, Overdose, and Death*

Grief is a bitch.

Grief can be a bigger bitch than Karma at times.  At least with Karma, we can blame our Past and/or Present Selves along with our Ancestors.

Grief though…

Grief will kick you in the ass when you least expect it. Just when you think you have gotten over a loss (whether death, breakup, termination, whatever), BAM!! You get knocked sideways, pulled underwater, and you either wear yourself out fighting to get to the surface, or to just give in and drown.

Sometimes, that loss is our own doing.

Sometimes, that loss is a blessing in disguise.

Sometimes, that loss is necessary to someone else’s Journey.

No matter the form or reason, the loss can hurt us in ways we never imagined.

But grief can destroy our lives and our relationships.  If we let it.

Grief over the loss of my brother in late June of 2020 almost cost me my marriage and my boyfriend.  It almost cost me, me…

For more than half of his life, my “baby” brother battled with addiction.  His addiction drove a wedge between us many times and for ten years I waited, in fear, for the call I received on June 28, 2020.  A deadly combination of fentanyl and heroine had taken my baby brother.  To make matters worse, he was discovered by my mother when she went to pick him up for a picnic and a Sunday afternoon together.

There are not enough anguishing words to describe addiction and what it does to its victims and their Beloveds.  If you or a Beloved have never had to battle addiction, thank whatever form of Divine you believe in.

Right now.

No matter the addiction, it becomes the master, and the addict becomes its slave. Period.

Yes, there are conscious choices an addict can and must make to either fight or give in.

When your world is falling apart all around you, and you feel like Divine and all of your Beloveds have deserted you, and you see no way out, the addiction can CONSUME you.  It delights in your pain and grief.  It whispers false promises of relaxation, numbness, release from whatever pain you are feeling emotionally or physically, and pleasure. So much pleasure.

When you try to ignore those whispers, the addiction starts to yell.  When you try to ignore the yelling, the addiction literally beats the hell out of you with its withdrawal symptoms.  Even those who manage to overcome their addictions must choose to fight it EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. Sometimes every hour or every minute.  The battle never really stops.

Loving someone who is an addict is a life full of shitty emotions with touches of hope.  When you see your addict start to turn their life around and take the addiction by the horns, you are full of hope and gratitude, tinged with fear.

My relationship with my brother was complicated.  I am the oldest, 4 and 5 years apart from my sister and my brother.  I was not ever particularly close with either of them growing up.  As an adult, I wasn’t very close with them either. My sister and brother were closer to each other. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be close to them. I just wasn’t.

I watched as my parents and my sister continued to cater to my brother constantly.  Whether it was giving him money, a free place to stay, putting him through whatever education he needed for whatever career path he wanted for the time being, or bailing him out of jail, they always gave in.

I learned quickly enough that my brother was into narcotics.  I’m not sure how it started.  I don’t know if it started with some injuries he received and grew from there, or if the addiction started sooner.

I found out $500 I had paid my brother to do a job he barely finished went up his nose, I decided right then and there that I would never give him any more money.  That was almost 20 years ago, and I never did.

Over the years, I learned to ride the waves of my brother’s addiction.

I feared for him.

I would moderate my hope when he seemed to have pulled it together.

My brother spent a great deal of his childhood being shipped off to relatives, friends, and military school because he was “too much” for my mom to deal with.

For our entire lives, my mom hated doing “the dirty work” with her children. She wanted to swoop in and be the loving mother, but she never wanted to do the hard work that comes along with it.  She would foist my brother off on whomever she thought could relieve the pressure from her.  My dad just kind of went along with whatever my mom said to do with him.

They had a miserable marriage. I think for my dad, he felt that the easiest thing to do was to just do what she said concerning their children. She manipulated his interactions with his children and our interactions with him.

Once we kids grew up, my dad divorced my mom. Yet, my mother continued to manipulate – or tried to – our interactions with our dad. She expected my dad to bail out my siblings any time they got into trouble and to carry most of the monetary weight of it.

My brother had a friend Joe, who he had known and loved since he was 2 years old. Our family last saw Joe at an Easter Dinner at my mom’s house in 2014. Joe had severely injured his hand, was dealing with some heavy personal issues, and was a hot, drunken mess. My brother and his wife brought him so he could be loved and supported.  I remember watching with adoration how my brother was trying to take care of his friend and how everyone there was holding space for Joe while he was at one of his lowest points.

Later that year, my brother held this broken young man as he died of an overdose of alcohol and depressants.

This isn’t the kind of thing you just “get over”. 

My brother tried to get clean then, but he didn’t have availability to the kind of treatment he needed; and he went into a downward spiral.  While living with my sister and her now ex-husband, William got pissed off about something and during a fight with my sister, he pulled a gun on her.

His marriage started to disintegrate as he and his wife both had their own terrible demons to fight, and they couldn’t give each other the support they needed.

I watched as my parents continued to bail him out of jail.  I would beg my parents to use some “tough love” and quit bailing him out of EVERYTHING and get him into some sort of program.  With no insurance, my mom said that the only rehabs he could afford were state-run which wouldn’t be any good.

He and I got into a HUGE fight due to my mother manipulating something I said in a heated debate with her (because she COMPLETELY misunderstood what I was saying) to my brother and he called My husband and shouted out horrendous and false accusations to him.

It was his fucked-up way of trying to rush to my mom’s defense because she was in tears over what she THOUGHT I was trying to say to her. She and I cleared it up within a day two but not before the very severe damage was done to my brother and my relationship.

One thing about my brother was that whether he was high or not, he fought fiercely for those he loved. Sometimes so fiercely, he lost sight of what he was doing, like a berserker.  He did just that, and we didn’t speak for two years.

My dad had fallen ill and was living with us for some of that time.  It became difficult for my brother to spend much time with my dad. It got to the point where if my brother needed to be at my house I’d just leave.  But I didn’t trust my brother in my house.  I had to hide prescriptions when I knew he was coming over.  I hated it. But my trust was completely gone.

My grandmother died during the time we weren’t speaking.  William tried to come up and talk to me after the funeral. I refused to speak to him.  I didn’t want his apologies to come out of grief for my grandmother’s passing or because she had died, he was “supposed” to make amends.

Months later he sent me an apology email, through my dad.

He died 8 months after.

I give thanks every day that I accepted his apology.  I have yet to completely defeat the gremlin who tries to convince me I should have reconciled things at my grandmother’s funeral.

I still do battle with the gremlin who reminds me that when he called me three days before he died, I was in a hurry to get him off the phone because I was grieving a friend who had just passed; and I was worried William was going to ask me for money.  He simply asked my opinion about whether or not he should buy a van and let me know that he too just lost yet another friend to Death.

I am still at battle with gremlins of remorse, regret, and even guilt.  All of these gremlins stem from wishing I had been closer to him. Wishing I had made more of an effort to be closer to him like my sister was.

I battle gremlins of anger. So much anger.

I went through the motions of “doing the right thing”.  I sought therapy and got a job I initially loved and that was the perfect distraction.  I convinced my therapist I was fine and no longer needed her and I dove deep into my job.  On some fucked up level, I managed to convince myself that I was convincing everyone else that I was fine.

Those closest to me knew better but also knew that to insinuate otherwise was going to be like talking to a brick wall.

On the inside though…on the inside, I was intensely, vehemently ANGRY.  The struggle to function every day was growing into this little ball of fury with nowhere to go.

EVERY. FUCKING. BIT. OF. IT.

The only ones who would ever have the chance to escape those Flames of Destruction were my children.

Everything else? Everyone else? FUCK THEM ALL.

Fuck my Gods. 

Fuck my Ancestors and Past Selves who helped get me into this fucking mess.

Fuck my Guides who quit talking to me (not that I was listening).

Fuck my husband who just wanted his wife back and “just didn’t get it” because I didn’t know how to talk to him because he “doesn’t do emotions” and it made him feel bad not knowing what to do.

Fuck my boyfriend for wanting to help me work through my emotions which would set off a torrent of tears and sadness that would never end.

Fuck the communities I pushed away because I couldn’t deal with anyone else’s shit.

Fuck my friends who I didn’t want to burden because I knew they had their own messes they were dealing with.

Fuck my parents for not being the same after my brother left us.

Fuck my mom for all of a sudden wanting to be affectionate and wanting to spend time with me after 40-plus years of wanting neither.

Fuck my dad for disappearing into his own grief, anger, and guilt.

Fuck everyone who needed or wanted something from me that I just didn’t have the desire or ability to give wholeheartedly.

Fuck everyone who wanted to love, support, and help me because I had NOTHING to give them in return and I spent the majority of my life being the Giver, not the Receiver.

When I said I wanted to burn it all down. I wanted to BURN IT ALL DOWN.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t suicidal. Not by any stretch.

I just wanted to burn it all down, cut and run, and go live in a shack on the beach somewhere selling seashells for booze and food.

A therapist once told me “Anger is not an emotion; it is a symptom of emotions”.

A series of events has led to me being forced to really sit and examine my emotions and how I have dealt with them. And the more I sat in this muck, the more I agreed with him on that.

For me, in some fucked up way, it felt much easier to be fiercely angry and to feed off the anger than it did to feel the immense grief, helplessness, hopelessness, and guilt that was at the very root of it all. Unfortunately, all that anger was causing me to push people away under the premise that I was protecting them from my Darkness.

Without Darkness, there cannot be Light.

No matter how lonely or isolated I might have felt, there were people waiting with bated breath to offer me whatever support they thought I needed.  However, in order for me to acknowledge and accept that support, I had to get very vulnerable and very uncomfortable.  I was uncomfortable enough as it was.  The thought of letting go so I could accept the love and support that was waiting for me was unbearable.

My relationships with Divine, my Spirit Team, my Family, my Boyfriend, my Husband, my Beloveds, and Myself were all hanging by a very thin thread.  It got to the point where I almost gave no shits at all what they were.

After a very harsh and brutal wake-up call and a couple of whacks in the head with some “Spiritual 2x4s”, I got myself in a position where I was forced to start picking apart the nasty, sticky, tangled web I had managed to crawl into and roll around in.  I started with small steps. Steps I would have recommended to anyone who came to me for Guidance.

Reading books that were filled with characters’ connections to their gods, Spirits, and Ancestors.

Journaling; taking time in the morning to ground and center and talk with my gods, Guides, and Ancestors; breathing, visualization exercises; yoga.

Yoga.  I’ve never been a yoga person, but I found myself pulled into a then-new yoga studio nearby and embraced by wonderful teachers and community.

In Yoga, I found the Strength in the Stillness and the Release. 

I started opening up more to myself and to others, accepting offers of support and social engagements, even though parts of me wanted to shout, “HELL NO!” and run and crawl into a cave.

Grief doesn’t run on a linear timeline. No one can dictate their own or anyone else’s grief timeline.

I miss my brother every day.

Every day I have to navigate those tricky, dark, deceptive, grieving waters.

My gremlins still do all they can to get my attention daily.  I have learned that there is a very fine line between letting myself surrender to the sadness and tears when I need to and letting the gremlins write my story.

I WRITE MY STORY. 

While I will surrender to my sadness and tears from time to time, I will not surrender my Joy and Pleasure.

I will not surrender my opportunities to bring Joy, Love, Support, and Guidance to others.

I will not surrender to fear, anger, regret, or anxiety.

When I let myself stop fighting, I am able to provide myself with some comfort and soothe my anxiety and fears and be more present and not worry too much about what may or may not happen next.

I have a technique that I use that is a combination of other techniques I have learned about over the years.  Which I will share with you right now.

Wherever you are, stop for a moment (if you can safely do so).

Imagine billions of threads coming out of your body, out of every pore, going out to the Ether and the World, and into the Earth, connecting you to all things Spirit (whatever that may look like for you).

Take a deep breath in from all those fibers and fill your entire Being with Gratitude, Love, and Faith.

As you exhale, expel all your fear, anxiety, anger, and pain.

With the first inhale, imagine the energy coming from the upper sector fibers- torso up and let the fear and nasty going out through the lower half and into the Earth to be recycled into better energy.

On the second inhale, breathe up from the Earth and all feel her Love, Foundation, Strength, Support in Gratitude, Love, and Faith; and let the fear and nasty going out to the Ether, to be recycled.

Alternate back and forth.

I do this exercise for about 6 inhales or until a smile reaches my face and heart because I feel better – whichever comes last.

This exercise has saved me countless times in dealing with so many different challenges that have come up over the last several months.

However, this exercise has not made it so I have to quit doing the Work on Myself or on my relationships. This exercise has allowed me to find my footing and clarity so that I am able to quiet those gremlins and work to get to the root of whatever is going on within myself so I can take on whatever situation I need to navigate at the time.

It brings me back to the Breath, Stillness, Quiet, and Love within Myself and all around me.

I hope it can do the same for you.