Loss

For those in the wake of great grief

Photo by Mike Labrum on Unsplash

To grieve is to be crushed.

To be gutted.

Of course it hurts. It hurts in a way that defies description. The gut turns, precious air escapes you, and it feels like a hole has opened inside that will never again be filled. Perhaps it won’t ever be filled. And perhaps, we’re not sure if we actually want it to, for fear that to be filled again will begin the process of forgetting.

But should we wish the pain to leave? Of course, as pain racks us for days on end, we wish for temporary relief. One can only handle so much. But our grief is the evidence that we had something worth having, that we allowed someone else to become so bound up in us that they took part of us with them when they left.

There are griefs that seem wrong, like a callous spit in the face of our concepts of god and right. We know, deep down, whenever we open ourselves to love, how it ends. Love ends in death or pain, yet still we consider it worth this inevitable sacrifice. But some griefs seem at odds with the natural order of things. Those taken too soon, too young, without any sense. These are the hardest blows. In the words of King Theoden, “No parent should ever have to bury their child.” This too, is the most natural of feelings. A sense of betrayal, that of all people you should have seen death before this most crippling of griefs. This world of ours is all too often cruel, and it cares nothing for should. There is only that for which we hope or pray, and what is. There is no true salve, no words of wisdom to heal such pain. Time, contrary to the common phrase, does NOT heal all wounds. Instead of running from this, we must learn instead to live wounded. All of us live wounded, in greater and lesser ways. To learn to accept our grief, to neither run from it nor to embrace it, but simply to sit with it, to see it as what it is, which is part of the fabric of our lives itself.

In another way, grief is what it means to live. It is proof of life, of being. To share your life, your self, your all too limited time and vital force with another. As lonely as grief makes us feel, at root the alternative to grief is isolation. No matter how destructive your grief feels right now, it is proof that you are NOT alone, not really. Even if that person is gone now, they exist in you as memory, as pain, as love, as joy, as regret.

You are a record on which their story is written. You are an ancient clay tablet in which their life left its mark, their deeds a stylus that carved its way through your soft clay and left the message,

“I was here. I loved and was loved.”

That record is a sacred trust, and as their story becomes irrevocably intertwined with yours, it will be transmitted to others in myriad little unseen ways when YOU are gone. Your clay will naturally harden with time. It must harden. Let it harden enough to preserve their memory, so that you can tell their story to yourself and others, but not so much that you shatter and break.

Our grief gives our soul, whatever that may be, its shape. But it does not do it alone. The grief is there because something GOOD feels lost. The joy, the comfort, the companionship, the love.

But if we remember them, if we think of them and smile, is it truly lost? How many insignificant things come and go from our lives without notice? How many people flit through the periphery of our lives, causing naught but a ripple?

To grieve is to be upended, to capsize, to nearly founder. But to not grieve and be grieved is to truly disappear. The beautiful irony of our sense of drowning is that the memory of those whose absence almost drowns us is the lifeline that saves us as we struggle in the wake of their passing.

So hold your grief like a sacred flame. Like a flame, it hurts, it burns, and it can consume. But also like a flame, it can give light in the darkness, and hope to the world.

1. This piece was inspired by my own experiences, as well as the recent work of Forest Gren & Sherry Trentini. Scenes from the film Wind River also served as inspiration.