Grief Is Love: Living with Loss

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Perhaps they are not stars in the sky, but rather openings where our loved ones shine down to let us know they are happy.” ― Eskimo legend Pain and guilt. During this stage in grieving, the pain of the loss starts to set in. You may also feel guilty for needing more from family and friends during this emotional time. I would always look for clues to her in books and poems, I realized. I would always search for the echoes of the lost person, the scraps of words and breath, the silken ties that say, Look: she existed.” ― Meghan O’Rourke

Coping with Grief and Loss - HelpGuide.org Coping with Grief and Loss - HelpGuide.org

Everyone grieves in different ways. For some, it could take longer or shorter. I do know it never disappears. An ember still smolders inside me. Most days, I don’t notice it, but, out of the blue, it’ll flare to life.” ― Maria V. SnyderWhile sharing your loss can make the burden of grief easier to carry, that doesn't mean that every time you interact with friends and family, you need to talk about your loss. Comfort can also come from just being around others who care about you. The key is not to isolate yourself. So often we try to make other people feel better by minimizing their pain, by telling them that it will get better (which it will) or that there are worse things in the world (which there are). But that’s not what I actually needed. What I needed was for someone to tell me that it hurt because it mattered.” – John Green

Grief: The final act of love - Counselling Directory

In Portuguese, saudade: A deep emotional state of melancholic longing for a person or thing that is absent. It often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never be had again. While loss affects people in different ways, many of us experience the following symptoms when we're grieving. Just remember that almost anything that you experience in the early stages of grief is normal—including feeling like you're going crazy, feeling like you're in a bad dream, or questioning your religious or spiritual beliefs. Emotional symptoms of griefListing it out this way, it sounds quite pithy and cliche, doesn't it? It rings dangerously like something meant to round out the jagged edges of grief. I can imagine the rant of a griever, met with these sentiments from a well-intentioned friend at the wrong moment. These feel like a banal platitude, an effort to quell or distract from the immense pain of loss. Disenfranchised grief can occur when your loss is devalued, stigmatized, or cannot be openly mourned. Some people may minimize the loss of a job, a pet, or a friendship, for example, as something that’s not worth grieving over. You may feel stigmatized if you suffered a miscarriage or lost a loved one to suicide. Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.” ― Ray Bradbury Bargaining - feelings of guilt often accompany questions like "If only I had done more", "If I had only been...". That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.” ― Sarah Dessen

Love, Grief and Gratitude: A Reflection of Loss in the First Year Love, Grief and Gratitude: A Reflection of Loss in the First Year

It’s true what they say: Grief is love with no place to go. When you lose someone or something, you have all these feelings that no longer have a destination. The feelings just seep out of you like air in a drafty house. To get by, you have to find people to help you. You have to find your helpers. They will be the fuel to keep you going, the spark to get you started again. Thankfully, I have had many helpers in what I call my crazy new life. Though I’ve never been one to ask for help, I decided to see a grief counselor. It was then that I realized I had gotten it all wrong. By internalizing everything that I was feeling, I was helping no one and was definitely not helping myself. Grief, I have learned, is not something we can shun or pass through. It is something that is a part of us and longs to be embraced. Ironically, I was able to feel genuinely happy for the first time only after I leaned in to my grief. In October 1956, Joy Davidman was diagnosed with incurable cancer, news that hit C.S. Lewis even harder than he might have expected. Faced with losing her forever, Lewis realised that he’d fallen in love with Davidman. They ended up having a full Anglican wedding. Grief has taught me that loving is pretty similar to living: maybe, two lines in the same poem. Read these poems about grief to remember that death is part of the circle of life. That without an end, something couldn’t begin. And maybe circles don’t really have endings or beginnings, just continuations. We often think of grief as a strictly emotional process, but grief often involves physical problems, including:

Prolonged grief disorder

Yet grievers themselves articulate this same sentiment often - that grief is love. I have been thinking a lot lately about how love and grief, it isn't just a one-for-one exchange. It isn't that the exact same love we had for someone who was once living now transforms into the grief we have for them once they're gone. They consumed a space in our lives, they left a gaping hole, but grief feels somehow immensely bigger and greater than simply the hole. I think that might be why grievers talk about the relationship between love and grief in a different way than those offering banalities. The Presence of Absence I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process.” ― C.S. Lewis Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life’s search for love and wisdom” ― Rumi Can anyone understand how it is to have lived in the White House and then, suddenly, to be living alone as the President's widow?” All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today. – Lyndon Baines Johnson, in his first speech to Congress after the death of JFK