We don’t choose grief; it is imposed upon us as a significant aspect of love. Loss is an everpresent reminder that our love is powerfully seeking our heart’s beloved. This cannot be “cured” or fast-forwarded or skipped. It is not a malady but rather a condition of love wanting contact with what has been deeply familiar but is now transformed. Love seeks the validation of contact and reciprocation. But with death, the familiar no longer sits in the same chair, or reaches out to touch your hand. The unfamiliar – the depth of loss – seeps into your bones, bringing pain to your heart, your soul. You feel lost in this visitation, which is so deeply heavy and despairing. It is human nature to want to resist, short-circuit, find a way out of that which feels unbearable.
Yet Love and Grief are powerful and inextricable. When you love someone with all of your heart you miss them with that same heart, just as achingly and deeply. And the way through the grief is to be with it. Allow it in, sit with it, feel it, breath. Sob. Remember. Surrender. Feel every emotion that surfaces including anger or any other feeling that surprises you. Don’t edit. Just be. And then allow yourself, over time, to notice your overall journey with grief. It isn’t something that ever “goes away” just as love never goes away. They are intimately related and occupy the same spaces in our being. To love makes us fully human with the awareness that love transforms us, as does the process of grief: honoring Love with the knowledge that it never leaves us.
Eventually and in its own time, grief that has been allowed inhabits us differently: less as a fury and more as a testimony, deep in our marrow, that we were gifted love in an extraordinary way.
