Someone laughed.  It may have been my dad, mother, or one of the dozen best friends I had at school.  The sound of laughter was something that I would like to remember.  I learned that laughter was of little importance to the people who have not lived without it. It is until loss that we people are forced to take a step back and see the beautiful gifts that we should have seen as beautiful the whole time.

My world became much dimmer that day: harder to see the light, more difficult to find the good.  I felt as if everything I used to know had vanished within seconds.  My body felt as if it were trapped in quicksand, unable to escape the sorrow that sits on my brain like a blanket clouding my reasoning and making each day a task just to do the simplest things.  I began to miss the way my life used to be.

As I began my own private journey of grief, I learned that the thing about death that I didn’t understand is that not only do we lose the person we love, but we lose ourselves too. I lost my brother, but I also lost my parents, I lost my innocence, I lost my junior year, I lost school, I lost the beautiful sound of laughter,  and I lost being able to find the little bit of light in what seems like a never ending black hole.  I couldn’t help but feel that life had taken a toll on me. I felt it stabbed me in the heart and smiled while it turned the knife. But how could that be?  I am only seventeen.  My future was just starting.  My roller coaster was only supposed to be going up from here.
I wondered why I was given these painful shoes to walk in.  A million questions filled my head day and night drowning me with exhaustion.  School had turned into sitting at a desk in my living room, slowly falling more and more behind, but giving more effort than I ever had too. I missed the laughter that filled my home.  The silence that filled my house was anything but peaceful.  This silence was loneliness.  My parents surrounded me all day and night, but I still felt all alone.  I think my whole family felt alone.  How could you not? Death as we know it is a lonely thing.  No one is there to answer the million questions we are all wondering, no one is there to truly tell you everything is okay, we are simply left alone with questions and worries that will never be answered and holes in our hearts that will never be filled.

Grief comes and goes at various levels with every passing day, but it is always there and it never leaves.  It has become an invisible partner in my daily life that may sit quietly on my shoulder, or roar wildly and violently from within the depths of my soul where I can physically feel it tearing away at my heart.  You can’t see it.  No one can.  But believe me, it is ever-present. This grief made me feel I was robbed of my purpose and left with nothing but a numb silence.  I was alive, but I forgot how to live. 

Despite all of the hardship grief has brought into my life, it opened a door in my life that would have been permanently locked without it.  I was forced to be strong.  I was forced to learn things some people go a whole lifetime without ever knowing.  I was able to see the things that make life actually worth living. 

I promised myself I would rise up in despite of the everlasting ache. I hoped that one day I could see life in the colors that don’t exist. I longed for laughter; the type of laughter that made my stomach hurt, and I intended to find it.