Grief - A Testament to Love

 A lot of my readers write to me ask me about grief - about how long it should last, how bad should it hurt, why they can't get past it, and much more.   I'm always grateful to hear their stories - stories of how much love was present in their life, and how very fortunate they have been to have had a love deep enough to suffer grief for. 

But grief is a strange and complex animal, isn't it?   Ultimately, of course, it is a symptom of our misunderstanding of biomechanical death, and I could provide a list of reasons here why this is the case, and how one might process grief and its strange manifestations in their life while looking at death through a different lens.  However, no matter the nature of grief's origin, the fact remains that when someone or something we love very much dies or ends, we experience the shock of that event as if it were a loss.  And in many ways, it is:  we can no longer see or hear them, no longer touch them, or speak with them. If the loss is a marriage, we may grieve or hurt for what once was:  we may cling to memories of better times, and long desperately for them to return again.  None of these are invalid; all are very really experiences that we endure whenever we must let go of something we once held onto so tightly. 

Grief is the testimony of deep love. 

For some of us, grief is such a very personal thing - something we cannot share.  We nod and smile at the well-wishers; accept the condolences of our friends and family.  We plough ahead, moving through our days and months almost as if we were automatons, and while we know that life goes on and we must go on, as well, we can't seem to make ourselves really feel like going on. For some of us, it takes many many years to accept this feeling of what I call displacement - we cannot imagine a world where the physical body of our loved one is no longer. Of we cannot imagine a world where the marriage we worked so very hard to maintain has finally ended.   And the separation of our selves from that is what we feel the most, and grief in these cases presents herself like a sharpened blade: one that we rub ourselves against over and over again. For others, grief is a raging scream inside us - waiting to get out. We have to share it or it will break us.  We pour it out into everything we do: we expel our agony in every action we take after we feel this loss.   Neither approach is righ or wrong: they are personal ways of dealing with the deep rift that has been passed to us across time - they are the manifestation of many generations of amnesia - of forgetting what we once knew.   There is no shame in grief - it is a testament to a great love. 

The world is grieving right now, I believe.  She is experiencing great loss - the loss of our  abiding presence with her, of our remembering of her.  The world mourns too amid great violence and bloodshed - nearly everywhere.   For those of you who may be reading this and you are grieving a loss - maybe a job, a marriage or relationship, maybe the passing of a loved one: know that your grief is acceptable, it is not a fault in you or anything else.  It is merely a coming back to the core of what once we knew but have forgotten - is part of our journey back to what is real and what matters most, and what matters most is love. 

If you are grieving as you read this, I hope you find solace in the wind, warmth in the sun, peace in the moonlight.  I pray your heart and mind will find rest among the weary bones of deep grief, and that you will again begin to feel joy in your days.