When people use the word grief to describe their emotional experience, it can mean many different things. We grieve, as humans, when we lose something - or someone - that we love. We grieve when time moves us forward and we feel scared about letting go. Sometimes we grieve when one moment passes and turns into a new one, for the moment we knew so well is now gone, replaced by the unknown. We can grieve when we finish projects, jobs, or classes. We even grieve when we reach new heights in our lives, recognizing that a part of us in the past went without what we now have. Maybe not everyone actively grieves every time something comes to a close or changes, but at some point in our life, we will all absolutely feel grief in our bodies.
Grief is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as deep sorrow, especially that caused by someone's death. I feel like grief is a much more broad word, though, and since we have the word bereavement to describe the experience of processing the death and loss of a loved one, I think it's only fair that we let grief break open for us and mean something more nuanced than just the sorrow caused by someone's death. To me, grief is the sorrow caused by change in general. Grief is the heaviness, the bittersweetness, and the lack of permanence that we bump up against in life quite often. Grief is the empty space in our heart where something that no longer exists in our world used to live. Grieving is one of the most human experiences we can have, just like love!
I have a hunch that even when we aren't consciously aware of it, most of our emotional experiences involve or beget grief. We are not linear beings, we are cyclical and our emotional state is one of flow and connection. Our hearts are layered with gradient slabs of love and grief from all we have held dear in our precious hands and watched slip away or transform before our very eyes. The more we love in this world, the more we will meet grief face to face. For as we love so deeply, our human ego begs us to find security and settle into the illusion of permanence. We don't ever want to give up the love that we feel! However, life is ever-changing right before our very eyes. The ground shifts and people move forward still. We lose moments, experiences, relationships, and people and along with those things, we perceive the loss of love or comfort. On some levels, it is true that we have lost. But in the grand scheme of things, the love is just displaced and it finds us again, soon enough, through other moments, experiences, relationships, and people. We eventually learn not to expect things to remain constant, but when the tide changes we still can't help but feel the grief of that change deep within our bodies. That's natural to us and will always be, no matter how accepting we are of change. The grief is what makes us human!
Grief is a word that continuously comes back to me. Round and round we go, tangoing through life together. Every day that I live and breathe, my understanding of grief deepens and expands. I remember when I first actively experienced grief. I was processing the death of someone that I loved very much. I was 20. I had never lost a person that I loved before, not in terms of life and death. I'd lost best friends that I loved dearly to the consequences of growing up and growing apart. I'd lost a cat that I loved and cared for, but even then I wouldn't allow myself to feel the loss. It didn't make sense to me, the emotions I was feeling. It was far too much for me to move through so I stuffed it away, deep in my body.
I didn't truly know grief until the man I loved died. We were so young and without truly realizing it, I bet my entire future on the surety that he would always be in my world. When he died suddenly and without warning, so did all of the versions of my life and my future that I had ever known for myself. When he died, I was suddenly alone in this world. Two months after he died I celebrated my 21st birthday feeling like a newborn in this scary world. I was still on my journey through life but somehow it felt entirely different. Everything had changed.
Obviously, I grieved. For two years I remained tightly sealed off from the world, from dating, and from opening my heart to anyone or anything. No love in, no pain out. A simple yet effective equation! Even when I crossed paths with someone who stirred the dust in my aching heart, I could do nothing but panic and suffer. I fell into a cycle of polarization: first would come the isolation and then I would push myself severely out of my comfort zone to try to balance it out. Repeat. In both places, I grieved. I still grieve, although, my ability to grieve has deepened and with that, so has the pain. But just as my ability to grieve has deepened over the last six years, so has my ability to love.
I'm sure that I always continue to dig deeper into my grief because even though I'll marry one day and build a life with another man I'll love, nothing in life can erase what I've been through, what I've felt. In me there will always exist at least two versions: the me who is frozen in time in the memories of the past that can never be resurrected, and the me who was born from that death and will forever be on the other side of those memories. For as long as I live going forward, there will always be a man who I loved more than life itself and he will always have died at the age of 20. I will always have been reborn at the age of 20, no longer as naive to life as I once was. I will be much older one day, my hair gray and my body aching from a life well lived and he will always be 20, frozen in time. Therefore, every moment of my life, even the most joyful, happy, love-filled times will always be that - full of love and grace - while simultaneously reminding me of what I have lost and the version of my life that died at 20. The layers of love and grief will forever spill into each other as the two parts of myself sway back and forth, together but always separate.
As I build new layers of love in my heart, they will always be surrounded by grief. Just as the grief in my body will always be held by more love. I'll either feel so much love that it hurts in some places and reminds me of what's been lost, or I'll hurt so badly that I'll feel cradled by love once more and be soaked in gratitude for what I have at this moment. One leads to the other, back and forth, but the two do not cancel each other out. Not by any means. We are built from love and grief and we will always oscillate between them, for they are two interconnected halves of a whole, rotating around and around with endless fervor. While they dance they also strike an impeccable balance within our being. One that contains all of the shades of existence, showing us the full potential of our being in all directions.
One of my all-time favorite quotes is about this phenomenon exactly: "The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater." said by J.R.R. Tolkien. I love this quote because it gives me the space I need to understand the paradox of life. I believe that love and grief are a cycle, just as life and death are a cycle. On grand, devastating levels as well as throughout the day-to-day of life and all of its teeny tiny moving pieces. I've heard grief described before as all of the love within our bodies that no longer has a place to go. For where there is life, there is death. Where there is love, there is grief.
Grief is evidence of profound love and resonance. It is what remains behind when all is lost - or different, showing us the truth of what we once had in our little universe. Oftentimes grief reveals to us that which is most sacred and important to our hearts, simultaneously bordering us off from ever going back. It is information we wish we knew before, words we wish we had said, love we wish we had shared, and feelings we wish we had expressed. It is the moment of reckoning after the tides have shifted and the tomb is forever sealed. We are grateful for what we now understand, but we are lost to the purpose when what we now understand would be most divinely paired with what we have lost. There is no going back, only forward in the strange new ways of what we now understand but cannot change.
So that, my friends, is just a snippet of my beliefs and thoughts on grief. It can be rather morbid and heavy at times to talk of such suffering but know that I view my sorrows more through the lenses of poetry than despair. Although despair will find its way through the cracks from time to time, those moments are fleeting and the poetry I feel in my heart from the infinitely colorful emotional experience I have here in life, well that is worth it to me in the end. For it is the poetry in me that wrote these words for you today and it is the poetry in me that will continue to help those around me to understand and process their versions of grief.
Grieving may hurt, it may involve pain like you've never felt before, but in due time this pain that weighs you down can make way for the love that lifts you off of the ground! If only you'd be so wise as to feel what hurts, slowly and gently within your heart, well, then you would have more space for the love that you fear you've lost to find its way back to you.
The same love, a fresh journey. YOU are reborn!
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
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