Dealing with Grief in University

By Kira Shteiman, Sponsorship Coordinator

It is often said that grief has an expiration date. For years, I clung to that phrase as if it were a promise owed to myself, an escape route I could follow to outrun my feelings. I treated university as a fresh start. Queen’s felt like the clean slate I had been dreaming of, a chance to leave the weight of everything that had ever occurred. However, I quickly learned that the more you run away from grief, the faster it finds you.

From an outside perspective, it may have appeared as if I remained a sunshine filled girl after my dad passed away six years ago. He was my best friend, the parent I resembled both from the inside and out. After his death, I convinced myself that the best way to heal was to keep moving forward as if nothing had changed. I buried the memories and repeatedly told myself that forgetting would make it hurt less.

When I arrived at Queen's, the same mindset followed me. Within the first couple of weeks, I felt as though I was filled with hope and excitement. I truly believed that I turned a new leaf within my reset. However, when midterms approached I felt myself slowly spiral and eventually lost myself. My confidence and spirits cracked under the pressure. I found midterm week to be disastrous, I was ridden with anxiety and self-doubt. For the first time, I began to realize that I was not running away from my grief, but was carrying it with me.

Throughout the rest of the semester I found myself feeling empty and hopeless. I went home more often than I wanted to admit, unable to shake the unease that had settled inside me. After a lot of reflecting, I found myself to always stop at the thought of my dad. I realized that I have built a mental block that prevented me from constantly reliving the thought and memories of him.

With time, I began to seek ways to embrace grief. As painful as it was to unleash all the emotions I have been dealing with for over six years, I realized that healing comes from remembering, not forgetting. I began to face my grief head-on, allowing myself to sit with the pain instead of pushing it away. I began speaking about my dad to family members and friends to try and undo the damage I have formulated of suppressing my feelings.

Experiencing grief at a young age is isolating in ways that words can barely express. It comes with guilt, confusion, and the constant pressure to seem like you are doing alright. However, I am not here to tell you how to grieve. Everyone grieves differently and has different ways of coping. One thing remains stagnant, and that is the fact that there is no perfect answer to grief. Grief does not have an expiration date. It stays with us, not as a weight meant to hold us down, but as a reminder of how deeply we loved someone.