I am still grieving.

I think I am ready to talk about grief again.

I’ve spent the past five years unfolding underneath it’s layers, learning how to be a functioning person again. I have partially regained my footing in this world, slowly coming back to the surface of who I am. But grief has thousands of colors. One day it is subtle, gnawing. The next day it is sharp, impenetrable. Some moments I feel that I’ve mastered it, learned how to soothe my soul when the longing grows too heavy. Take a walk, play guitar, cry it out - I know the drill. And yet the aching still seizes me in the middle of the night. It still grips me in the shower. I still often feel like a moving mass of grief shaped like a human.

The older I get, the more difficult it becomes to speak my truth out loud. To accept it. To give the grief a life in cold, hard words - the kind that freeze my tongue, curdle in my throat. Five years later, and the numbness is just beginning to disintegrate.

I am grateful for the catharsis I experienced through writing The Language of Loss. That book gave me purpose and will to get out of bed in that first year. I developed connections with people I needed to keep me going. My dad came alive again through my stories, and I believe I created something of deep, empathic value, not just for others, but for myself, my family, and my future kids.

The most difficult challenge I faced after publishing was the finality of it all. I had a 286-page labor of love in my hands, but I was still drowning in his absence. Writing had not healed me. Publishing had not healed me. I felt as though I had excavated the deepest, most vulnerable parts of myself, given it to the world under a pretty cover with the subtext: “Here is what it’s like to grieve. Here is me, here is my experience, wrapped in a book. And guess what? It’s only 286 pages long.”

Grief is not 286 pages long.

I am not 286 pages long.

I have many more years of my life to develop, nurture, and understand my relationship with grieving.

The grief I knew as an 18-year-old girl is radically different from my experience as a 23-year-old woman. Every year, I learn something new, always oscillating between the feeling that things are okay and things are not okay at all. The pendulum swings from remedial levels of inner peace to visceral pains that split my soul in half.

I get my first paycheck to my first big-girl job, and I am on top of the world. My brother cuts his hair and it feels like the walls are closing in. My aunt has a baby, I’m a proud godmother. My cousin gets married. We dance, although it aches. I get a boyfriend and we form a band together. I gain best friends who make me belly-laugh and never know my dad. I buy myself a queen bed, move a couple times, and master the art of seasoning salmon. My brothers are tall and broad and strong like him. My uncles laugh the same. My room is still my favorite place to be.

My life is filled with wonder, rage, and longing; I am growing up and devastated to the core that my dad has missed all of it.

My college years were draped in what I would call a sort of “hapathy”, something halfway between happiness and apathy. I felt the symptoms of happiness, but the fibers holding me together felt flimsy, ready to collapse at any moment. Everything that didn’t have “my dad is dead” floating above it in shiny neon letters fell on the periphery of my brain. With his passing only 5 months before I moved away, I willed myself into the mindset early on: Just get through this.

An unexpected internal conflict plagued me as I learned how to make new friends. I had been an extrovert my entire life. I had always been loud, goofy and outwardly confident, the first to introduce myself to new people at a party. Although I still craved the intimacy of new friendships, grief had extinguished any desire to actively seek them out. Not only was I grieving my dad, but I was grieving the person I had been. The sense of self I had lost. The truths about Natalie Sanchez that I was relearning, reinventing, or completely throwing away after 18 whole years of creating her.

But I did it.

I made good memories. I made good friends. I joined club soccer, had plenty of shrimp scampi-making movie nights with my roomates, did the college things. I picked up a part-time job at the gym, joined a grief group, and chipped away at my degree while pouring whatever was left of myself into my journal and my guitar.

It didn’t truly sink in, until one day post-grad, when I was mindlessly scrolling through hundreds of graduation posts. Perfectly posed pictures of people popping their champagne in their magna cum laude cords, throwing their hats in the air, with a detailed biography of what seemed like their perfect past four years.

And suddenly I was crying, self-pity tears and all.

I desperately wanted to feel that exuberance, that contagious, collective pride for finishing my undergrad. I wanted to relate. I wanted to celebrate. I wanted to be the perfectly posed picture between two parents on a sunny May afternoon.

My graduation felt like relief. A capstone to the numbness. I stood face to face with my resentment, grieving a life that only existed in a reality where my dad was here.

And I quietly moved forward, as we do.

As stability carved a new mold for my life, I learned to let go of what I couldn’t change. I learned to function consistently again, clinging to the grounding routines of a new job. At first I had to remind myself how to do it. This is how you get out of bed, I thought. This is how you write an email. This is how you put on makeup and pack yourself a lunch. Taking such intentional, consistent care of myself was foreign, and I began to see my grief through the eyes of a woman.

I struggled to pinpoint whether it was me or the grief that transformed first. In many ways, my sadness felt more intense and more fragile. On paper, I had taken a step into the version of myself I always dreamed of becoming - working as a videographer and photographer at a non-profit with people that I love, taking guitar lessons for the first time, settling into my apartment with one of my best friends. Things started falling into place. My boyfriend and I formed the Gekkos, in honor of the name my dad had always wanted for his own band. I launched my business. I suddenly had space in my life, to read, create, meditate, journal. I felt good around the edges, and yet my dad’s absence still haunted me from the inside out.

I have been in this chapter of my life for awhile now, trying to understand what it means and how to continue grieving. I always come back to writing. This blog has been in the works for over three years, open on a tab I was always terrified to touch. I am still navigating the aftermath of a sudden tragedy, still learning how to get out of bed in the morning. I still wake up at 2am and think that he is here.

A few years ago, I promised myself that I would always tell the truth.

Today, and always this is my truth.

I am still grieving.