Grief is Love

Loving makes us vulnerable and susceptible to grief/loss

I write to process. I write as therapy. I write to tell my stories. I write to make sense of my stories, to reframe them, in order to get to own them.

And I’m doing a lot of processing lately. Hence—the many updates.

I found this quote the other day on Instagram and I really loved it:

“It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is a terrible reminder of the depths of our love and like love, grief is non-negotiable.”

~Nick Cave, the Red Hand Files

You can’t have one without the other.

Much like vulnerability, you must risk to love. This means you’ll experience loss.

Most of us exit this life without our partner exiting at the same time.

Most all of us will experience a death, a loss of someone we love deeply.

Most of us will lose someone we can’t imagine our lives without, even ones we thought we may not be able to live without.

Such is the bounty of tax, the price we pay for love.

And yet, how worth it still that it is.

I cried for my mother today. For my child[ren].

I know it’s because I loved them both very deeply, with all my heart.

I grieve for them because I have love that now as nowhere to go. So I cry, pained and overcome with the emotion.

I was speaking with a friend today who said that grieving sucks.

Indeed it does. It often seems a never-ending road.

For my friend, who is grieving since she lost her husband, there is no getting on with life, getting over it, or being finished with grief.

We never close that chapter.

We grieve those we love deepest for the rest of our lives, learning how to carry the loads of grief, how to co-exist with that heartache. We accept a new normal. Because we have to figure out how to survive. To go on.

Sometimes the things most worth having in this world, come with pain.

Ah, that old adage—from the Tennyson poem:

‘Tis better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all’.

Grief is the price we pay for love. So is that vulnerability, that rawness, the heartache.

Why? Because we—most of us humans—desire emotional connection, belonging, to love and be loved.

Because love, when it is right, when it is reciprocal, is truly all that matters.

And it’s why it’s worth the steep and painful risk that we’ll have our hearts broken, either through death or loss.

It sounds hokey, but it’s true—

Love is truly what makes this life worth living.