Grief & Harry Potter

To be fair, there were very few days after I lost grandma where I woke up genuinely disoriented. I was always keenly aware of where I was and what had happened. And that even continued into after I had moved into my first place for the very first time.

But there was one morning, probably sometime in late July or August, after everyone had left. It was one of the first weekends I had had completely off, alone in my apartment, with no one. And I woke up extremely disoriented.

I remembered pretty quickly, and was grateful it ended up being only that one time, but that morning was one of the worst. I woke up in a fog, disoriented, incredibly confused. The apartment seemed confusing, and felt unfamiliar, and I knew no one was going to be there. There was nothing else in the apartment with me. It feels appropriate here to say I was devastated, but the truth is looking back, I think I was devastated the whole time. But this was one particular morning I remember feeling the sheer severity of it. I was not at work, I had no one around, I had no idea what to do with myself and I was alone.
(I understand "I had no one around" and "I was alone" sound like the same statement, but I assure you, I felt both. I felt all of it. No one was around and I felt, very, very, very alone.)

I had no idea what to do. Honestly, I just wanted to reach out to someone that was in a similar situation to mine. I wanted to find someone who had lost their family. I wanted information on how to cope. I wanted books, message boards, something, anything to hold onto, to help me feel like I wasn't alone in this situation. I knew it wasn't a totally unique situation, but as I desperately searched online for any kind of material, it was pretty bleak. There's a lot on grief. There's a lot on loss of parents. Loss of whole family, not quite so much. That's a whole new loss. And it was awhile before I fully realized that it's actually two separate losses combined: the loss of your loved one, and also the loss of your immediate family. And I feel like they should be recognized as much, because they're both enormous blows.

My counselor never really approved of the idea of looking for books on this subject. He felt like this pushed me back, kept me focusing on the problem and not moving forward. I told him I thought he was wrong, and that I needed something to help me sort through it, just to acknowledge that it was incredibly painful and that someone else had been there and made it through it. Like a beacon, or a light. A path. Take any metaphor like that you want.
And mind you, this was just months afterward. The shock hadn't even worn off. So this was not me not "trying to push ahead." This felt like me still in the middle of the crater after an explosion had just gone off. Where do you go? What do you do? How are you still alive? What do you do next? Can anyone help you figure it out?

So on that awful, awful morning, I pulled up my laptop and searched even harder for books and came up with nothing again. I was almost distraught.

And with all of that introduction, it may feel like a joke to say "And then at the bottom of the article, someone mentioned Harry Potter," but that's exactly what happened. I blinked. I hadn't considered fiction (full, of course, of loss of families.) It mentioned it as a 'bonus' feature on their grief list, not one they really included, but brought up for your consideration anyway. I loved Harry Potter and had considered re-reading it for some time before everything had happened anyway. And I was desperate. So I immediately shut down my laptop and ran and grabbed my copy. I spent the day curled up in bed, re-reading Sorcerer's Stone and crying all through it. But it felt so good. It felt like I finally did have something to hold onto: here was a character that had made it. I didn't even care at this point that he was fiction. There was Harry Potter, and all these characters that I loved and adventures that were wild and topics that were relevant to me. It was warm and familiar. I focused on the soft blankets and the comfort from the book and it all washed warm and soothing over me.

There was still going to be serious struggles ahead, but all I needed in that moment was something to help get me through that one day, and it succeeded. Harry Potter would end up carrying me through a few weeks as I dove back into the series as a whole. And as afraid as I was that that piece of me would never be understood, it was to some extent reflected in that book series, and for that moment that was enough.

(Addendum here, because it needs to be said: I do have many, many friends and family who have loved me for so long and were, with Christ, the biggest weight carriers here for me. I was not alone.  I never, ever want that to be unsung or unsaid or misunderstood.  I can't even begin to imagine what this would have been like if even one of them was missing. They were all and have always been such beautiful people helping keep me together in such beautiful ways. Harry Potter, and other small things, would help to start piecing things back together in my own mind, and moving me forward on my own when I was by myself, but Christ & my loved ones were always the ones holding me together when I couldn't.)