The little girl in the grade below me died because a drunk driver hit the car she was riding in. A classmate was killed in high school after the car she was riding in slammed into a bridge on an icy morning. A former friend’s best friend was killed doing a motorcycle trick leaving behind his young pregnant wife. In law has lost her sister to cancer, father, mother to alzheimer’s, husband to angyna attack, brother to cancer, son to cancer. Now another family member is suffering from a heart condition. Grandmother lost my grandpa after battling years with Alzheimers, grandmother passed after too many things just continued destroying her ailing body. My grandfather passed suddenly after a surgery in the hospital from a weak heart.

If you look around, there are many stories of grief. How aware are you of those griefs? How have those people moved forward in their lives, or have they at all? What words were said to them to give some ounce of comfort or understanding, and what did those words mean to them?

My story is just one of many. I am no special than any another. The past two years have been hard, no doubt, but so were the lives of all these people, so are they now, and so shall there be more.

Why do some get more than others? No understanding, I don’t even attempt to understand anymore, as it only leads me to a restless heart. I guess the thing driving me now is that good has to come from this, because of my pain, I need to transfer that to good to help someone, to spare someone of their future pain, their current pain, their past pain. Can’t I just take a little bit of the edge off for them? Shouldn’t I educate YOU on what to say to someone who just lost the love of their life? Can’t we all understand how to best support those who are caretakers, grievers, dream losers?

If I try just a little bit harder, ask a few more times, inquire to more places, open my heart up to listening to tough stories, be that shoulder for others, even though it hurts, does it break apart that cloud of death and cancer that follows me wherever I go? Just a little bit? I like to think so.

I have to try at the very least. My story may not be any worse or any better than another, but in telling it, in writing my memoir, in dishing out my emotions in this blog, by speaking at workshops, and freelancing for publications on grief, will one person hear something different that may cause them to ask someone who is grieving if they need anything and what can they do? Will they stop and listen instead of running because they don’t know what to say? Would you stop? Would you be a shoulder even if you don’t know how? What make us different from one another when we all share the same pains in life-we all will share death at some point, and similar emotions at others. So shouldn’t we embrace one another during those aching times, even when we are weak?

For I am weak right now, sorrowful for the losses of others, suffocating by the cancer that infects my family’s lives, dreading the pains of my family that I do not know, aching for the loss of my own, yet in that tangled mess is hope. I feel hope, I feel like there will be a moment when good breaks through. I can offer a light, a glimmer, a glimpse of something passionate and worthwhile for educating and taking.

I am weak, I am sad, I hurt, I ache, but I believe. Dammit, I believe.