Thoughts On Grief

Processing grief, again.

When you lose someone, in my experience, it is not just the loss of them in your life, but it is now the hoarding of the love you have for them just sitting inside of you with nowhere to go that is excruciating.

To my best understanding, and my personal experience, that’s what grief is.

The un-experienced love for another that is living inside you.

That love turns to pain because withheld love was never meant to be. 

But that person is gone, so where do you put that love, how do you give it if they’re not here?

Grief is accepting that the love you have for this person will never stop growing, and it’s learning how to give that love so it doesn’t poison you from the inside.

I love my parents, but there is not a healthy way to love them closely. Not being able to love them closely creates a lot of lonely moments in my life where celebration is holding hands with sadness, and the moments where I’m in need of comfort is a resounding gong of their absence. How I choose to engage in these moments is crucial for my well being.

I’ve learned that I can feel the pain of the moment, of this truth, and let it be released from me.

Or I can double down on the pain and multiply it by holding my breath and choosing to ignore it.

Acknowledging my pain in a healthy way is letting the love that I have for them be released.

Hiding from my pain, or wallowing in it, turns the love I have for them into hate. It turns me into a victim and them into a villain.

I end up resenting them from afar because I can’t love them up close.

Grief is a constant experience of love having no where to go.

That’s why I think I feel lost most of the time, or like I don’t belong, because I’m carrying so much love in me that has never had a home. 

The love in me is lost, and so I feel lost.

We belong where our love is found, and if our love has been rejected many times, we struggle to feel like we belong anywhere.

I’ve noticed this pattern in myself and my closest friends who have all experienced intense and sudden loss. These people are the most loving and passionate people who intimately walk with grief and daily feel its baggage of loneliness. And no matter how many people love them or express their love for them, there is still a sense of loss because a certain amount of love in them has no where to go.

It’s not because their friends are not loving them well enough, or are not good enough, and it’s certainly not because they themselves are not good enough — it’s just what happens when love doesn’t have a home. 

That’s what grief is — when love doesn’t have a home.

So what do we do?

We build a bigger home, with more windows and less walls. We give space for love to come and go freely in our lives in whatever form it shows. We let that lost love breathe and become what it is meant to become.

We let that lost love create beautiful things.

Sometimes those beautiful things are heartbreak and tears, and sometimes that beautiful thing is a new perspective and understanding for another that gives a home for other lost loves in the big house you’ve let it create.

With love,

Sarah

p.s. Grief is not just the loss of a life. It is the loss of a dream, of a job, of a love, of a friend, of self…