Understanding Grief in the Context of Love

 Grief is a phenomenon that we are all faced with at some point in life.  

It may be grief over a lost job, a home, a broken marriage.  It may be very literally a grief we experience over the loss of someone very important to us - like a parent, or a spouse or a child.   Regardless of how we experience it, grief  - much like death itself - is the great equalizer: it visits us all at some point in our journey. 

But for all our intimate knowledge of how it feels, do we really know what grief is? 

On its surface, grief is the sorrow we may feel when we experience a loss, as I described above.  But if we dig deeper, we will see that it is actually the manifesting of our fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to love.

There are about as many definitions descriptions for love as there are stars in the sky.   If you do a brief google search, you'll be inundated by an overwhelming amount of information.   But the most concise description I could find of love - in all its various forms and encompassing all its myriad changes - is to be found here.   Its an academic description, to be sure, but it does a good job of parlaying all the onion-like layers of love into a concise, readable narrative. 

If you take a look at it, though, you notice that the article describes love from a sensory input perspective.  What I mean by this is that you see a lot feelings mentioned - as if love is based on input from an external source.   And that's not an incorrect way of looking at it.  However, when we view love through the lens of grief and death - especially in terms of the loss of one we have loved - then this presents a problem for us. If we lose someone or something that once occupied such a strong sensory position in our paradigm, we will feel intense loss - and that at varying stages through out a process we call grief.  

This grief is not wrong. 

But it is incomplete. 

I believe grief is the result of limiting our love to sensory input from the external source that once was there but is no longer - that it is essentially the result of losing the ability to see, hear, touch, taste, smell, hold, talk to, fuck etc. the person with whom we were once able to do these very things.  It embodies a change in patterns for us - it dictates to us an immediate and abrupt shutting off of the sensory input upon which we so vehemently established our love.  

This is why we feel so empty and hollow when we lose a loved one - or anything precious to us - because it is impossible to replace the sensory input we lost when their biological machines ceased to function.   But this where we must re-learn what we know; and we must reimagine what we call death.  

Death is defined as the cessation of biological life.   But here in this definition lies the key to our understanding of grief and our moving beyond it:  biological life.  

In this one descriptive, I believe we can see the limitations of our paradigm in their entireity.   We may define life as biological, but the universe likely has other ideas about the matter.  Reimagining grief and moving past it - accepting our transition at the moment of death - necessitates a relearning of what it means to live. 

In our narrow primate neural pathways, we imagine life is restricted to the thoughts, sensations, feelings, experiences that we have while we drive this meatsuit through spacetime.    But I suspect, as we progress, we will learn that life is far more about the consciousness that drives the meatsuit, and then, further, we may learn that it is consciousness that creates life, and not the other way around. This theory is alreayd gaining ground with a great many academics and even those in the realm of medical science, in fact. 

It is my hope that we may eventually learn to embrace the absence of this sensory imput, and learn instead to "see" with different eyes:  so that we may know - as many spiritual traditions already teach - that death is nothing more than a transition from one form to another.  Our poor understanding of it has created fear and anxiety around it, but our evolution into an new understanding of it may help us rethink our processes of grief and loss altogether.