This Ain’t a Self-Help Book. It’s a Goddamn Autopsy Report from the Front Lines of Oblivion.
The morning after Patrick’s heart stopped, some chirpy drone dropped off a grief book with soft clouds and a fucking sunset on the cover. I didn’t even read the title—I turned that shit into a projectile missile and launched it like a grenade. It hit the wall so hard I half-hoped it’d take the whole goddamn room down with it.
Why? Because it was pure, industrial-strength horsefuckery. Every condescending, sugar-coated line written by some emotionally neutered therapist who’s never had their insides gutted in real time. “Healing takes time,” it cooed. “Grief is a journey,” it whispered.
NO, motherfucker. Grief is a chainsaw massacre of your reality. It’s a psychological IED going off in your soul while everyone around you just carries on like nothing’s burning. There’s no journey. There’s no closure. There's only carnage and you—bleeding out, teeth gritted, screaming through the rubble with no map and no morphine.
I’m Cassandra Crossno, and I didn’t survive this shit to write a cozy fucking pamphlet. I’m not here to stroke your hair or pat your back—I’m here to rip the blindfold off, shove a fucking flamethrower in your hands, and scream, “FIGHT!” Because when the person you love dies, the world doesn’t hand you a lantern and a map. It tosses you into a goddamn gladiator pit and tells you to shut up and smile while you’re torn apart.
This Is the Shitstorm You Now Call Reality
Picture this: you’re standing dead center in a six-lane highway. Traffic thunders past in a blur of steel and screeching tires. Your ears are shot. Your legs are useless. Your mouth’s open but no sound comes out. And all around you, people stand behind guardrails sipping lattes and yelling, “Just walk across! It’s not that hard!”
That is grief. That paralyzing, surreal, rage-fueled disconnect between your ruined interior and their shiny, intact bullshit lives.
No one hits pause when your world disintegrates. Time doesn’t freeze. Bills don’t stop. Your boss still wants the report. Your friends still wanna brunch. Meanwhile, you’re barely managing not to collapse in a grocery aisle because their favorite snack is still on the shelf and fuck, how is that even possible?
And society? That emotionally lobotomized organism? It gives you a two-week grace period before it starts tugging at your sleeve like a needy toddler: “Come on now, you should be feeling better.” Oh, should I? Fuck your calendar. Grief doesn’t give a flaming fuck about your quarterly goals or your awkward discomfort. It doesn’t adhere to your timelines. It doesn’t wrap up neatly with a bow. Grief is prehistoric. It moves like molten lava, slow and unstoppable, reshaping everything in its path—and it WILL bury you alive if you pretend it’s not there.
Year One: Welcome to the Wasteland
The Shock: Trapped in a Fucking Fever Dream
The early days after death aren’t even real. You operate on fumes, like a ghost haunting your own life. You make phone calls. You plan services. You wear clean clothes. And not one second of it sticks in your memory. It’s like someone else is piloting your meat suit while you watch from some far-off void, screaming into a vacuum.
It’s not weakness—it’s neurological triage. Your brain is throwing up steel shutters to keep you from losing your goddamn mind. But even that temporary shield malfunctions. One minute you’re making a list. The next, you’re on the kitchen floor hyperventilating because you picked up their mug without thinking.
They’re dead. Holy fucking hell—they’re really dead.
It never stops hitting you. That realization. It arrives again and again like a freight train to the chest. Your brain can’t hold it. It keeps rebooting. And every crash is a brand new goddamn apocalypse.
The Admin Shitstorm: Grieving While Drowning in Bureaucracy
Nobody tells you that death comes with a fucking administrative avalanche. Passwords. Paperwork. Phone calls that shred your soul one “I’m sorry for your loss” at a time.
“Hi, I’m calling to close my partner’s bank account.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Can I speak to the account holder?”
“THEY’RE FUCKING DEAD, JACKASS. I AM THE ACCOUNT HOLDER NOW.”
You’ll spend hours begging for access, hunting down documents, and screaming into hold music while your entire body feels like it’s been flayed open. Each call forces you to repeat the unholy truth. They’re dead. They’re gone. They’re fucking gone.
And somehow, you still have to be polite. Civil. As if your entire nervous system isn’t currently short-circuiting.
The Reality Collapse
Eventually, the dust settles. The texts slow down. The casseroles rot in your fridge. And that’s when it gets worse.
Because now it sinks in.
This isn’t a chapter. It’s the new book. And the main character? You—the half-alive wreck limping through the ruins with empty arms and dead eyes.
It hits during commercials. During laundry. On Tuesday mornings. You find their note in a drawer, or their shirt in the laundry, and your soul cracks like glass.
Forever. That’s the word that breaks you. Not "they're gone." But they're never coming back.
The Body Count: Grief Eats You Alive
Your Brain: Hijacked and Held Hostage
Grief is a goddamn neurological carjacking. You can’t think. You can’t remember. You can’t be. You reread the same text four times and still don’t know what the fuck it says. You forget appointments. You lose words mid-sentence. You sit in your car for hours because the concept of “driving” feels like advanced physics.
This isn’t laziness. This isn’t weakness. This is your brain on fire. Literally. MRI scans show that grief lights up the same pain centers as physical injury. You’re not imagining this shit—it’s real.
And just like trauma, it shreds your executive function. So if you’re wondering why you haven’t returned that email or cleaned the house—it’s because your mental RAM is running at 2%.
Fatigue That Could Level a God
Grief drains you like a parasite. You sleep and wake up more tired. You nap and wake up angry. You get winded walking to the goddamn mailbox. That’s not depression—it’s cellular burnout. Your body is metabolizing trauma every second of the day.
Immune System: Offline
Get ready to catch every virus known to man. Your immune system goes MIA. You’re grieving, not just emotionally, but biologically. And your body, brilliant as it is, starts skipping non-essential processes. Like defending against disease. Or regulating hormones. Or maintaining sanity.
The Chest Pain is Real
Grief feels like dying. Tightness. Breathlessness. Nausea. Pain so sharp you think you’re having a heart attack. And you go to the ER and they tell you, “Everything’s fine.”
NO. It’s not. Nothing is fucking fine. You just got medically gaslit by the fact that your pain doesn’t show up on an X-ray. But it’s there. Oh, it’s fucking there.
People Will Fail You: Let Them.
Grief Hierarchy: Fuck Their Ladder
You’ll find out real quick that society only validates grief that’s tidy and familiar. Lose a spouse or child? Here’s your sympathy starter pack. Lose an ex, a best friend, a pet, a lover nobody knew about? You’ll be met with awkward silences and side-eyes.
But grief doesn’t follow their goddamn rulebook. Your pain isn’t up for debate. If they mattered to you, then their loss is war. End of fucking story.
The Grief Police: Fuck Their Opinions
Everyone’s got an opinion. “You should move on.” “You should cry less.” “You should donate their stuff.”
How about YOU should go fuck yourself?
You don’t owe anyone an explanation for how you survive this. There’s no prize for grieving prettily. If screaming in your car at 3 a.m. keeps you alive? Do it. If you need to shut the world out for a year? Slam that door and lock it.
The Abandonment You Didn’t See Coming
People will vanish. Some will ghost you completely. Others will pretend everything’s normal, casually mentioning their lunch plans while you’re hanging on by a thread.
Let them go. Fuck ‘em. Grief is a wildfire—it burns away the bullshit and leaves only what can survive the heat.
The ones who stay? The ones who show up, sit in the ashes, and don’t try to fix you?
Keep them. That’s your tribe now.
The Friend Sorting Algorithm
The disappearing acts will hurt, adding rejection to your already overwhelming pain. And you'll want to scream, “WHERE THE FUCK DID YOU GO?” But here's the brutal truth: some people are cowards. They can't handle your pain because it reminds them of their own mortality. They ghost because they’re selfish, not because you did anything wrong.
And then… then there are the unexpected ones. The ones who step the fuck up. They send you food without asking dumb questions. They sit with you in silence without trying to fix a goddamn thing. They don’t flinch when you sob so hard you can’t breathe, or when you say things like “I wish I could fucking die too.”
These people? They're your war tribe now. Honor them. Keep them close. Because in this brutal hellscape, those rare souls who hold space without judgment are the only goddamn lifelines that matter.
Grief and Rage: Let the Fucking Fire Burn
Nobody talks enough about the white-hot, skin-blistering rage that grief unleashes. You’re expected to be sad. Broken. Crying in corners. But when you’re furious—when you want to punch holes in walls and scream until your throat bleeds? That makes people nervous.
Grief rage doesn’t give a flying fuck about social norms.
You’re pissed at the world. At God. At fate. At them—yes, sometimes even at the person who fucking died and left you behind. And guess what? That’s NORMAL. That’s HUMAN.
Don’t you dare stuff it down.
Smash plates. Go primal. Scream into pillows. Write rage-fueled letters you never send. Let that fury move through you. Because if you bottle it up, it’ll rot you from the inside out like emotional cyanide.
This is war. And rage is a weapon. Wield it when you need to. Just don’t let it take over your goddamn soul.
The Fucking Myth of “Moving On”
Let’s annihilate this bullshit concept right now: You don’t move on. You move forward—dragging your grief behind you like a sack of broken bones.
The idea that you’re supposed to “let go” is the kind of toxic horseshit sold by people who’ve never lost anything worth a damn. There is no timeline. No expiration date on pain. No magical switch where one day you wake up “over it.”
You adapt. You learn how to breathe in the crater left behind. You learn how to function with half your heart missing. You build a life around the void, not over it.
There is no closure. Fuck closure.
There is integration. Acceptance. Coexistence with pain.
Some days you’ll laugh again—real, from-the-gut laughter—and you’ll feel guilty as hell. Do it anyway. That’s survival.
Some days you’ll collapse under the weight again. That’s survival too.
You don’t move on. You carry. You fight. You fucking live. And that is the most badass thing you can do.
Your Pain Is Not a Fucking Problem to Be Solved
People will treat your grief like it’s a math equation. Like if they just say the right combination of words, you’ll be “fixed.”
They mean well. But their desire to help often turns into pressure for you to hurry up and heal—because your pain makes them uncomfortable. They want tidy emotions. Digestible sadness. Not the raw, screaming mess of reality.
Fuck that.
Your pain isn’t a flaw. It’s proof you loved deeply. That you gave a shit. That you were all in.
Let them squirm. Let them shift uncomfortably while you stand knee-deep in the blood and ashes of your own life and refuse to pretend it's okay.
This isn’t about making others feel better.
This is about giving yourself permission to fall apart—gloriously, violently, unapologetically—and not feel broken for doing so.
What Comes Next: Rebuilding from the Fucking Rubble
Eventually—after the dust settles, after the aftershocks fade—you will start to feel the faintest flicker of something else.
Not happiness. Not peace.
Something harder. Heavier.
Resolve.
It shows up in your spine. In the way you stand a little straighter. In the way you start to say “no” to bullshit you once tolerated. In the way you begin to choose yourself.
You don’t “recover” from grief. You reconstruct. Brick by bloody brick. Not the same house. Not the same person. But something new. Something forged in fire. Something unshakable.
And when the world looks at you with pity in their eyes, not realizing you’ve walked through hell barefoot and clawed your way back out?
Smile.
They have no idea who the fuck they’re dealing with now.
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