Grief is Love with nowhere to go

and that forever changes us

“Grief is the experience of navigating your loss, figuring out how to deal with the absence of your loved one forever.”

“That day….I was forced to start learning how to live without her, how to someone live a full and joyful life, with a permanent hole in my heart.”

~Marisa Renee Lee

I have heard the quote above before. But today, after listening to a podcast on grief, with grief expert, Marisa Renee Lee, it really resonated with me.

We grieve because we love. And since we still love the person, and even if we believe, even if they are still with us, here, or there, in some realm, not entirely dead or extinct, we can’t give them or show them the love like we want, like we are used to doing. Therefore, it gets stuck? It hurts. Perhaps, it makes us mad. Therefore, it is part of the cycle of grief and why grief is hard and hurts and is recursive. And sucks.

At any case, or in any way, this is why we don’t really get over a loss, even after a mourning period. We grieve, but it signals the start of a new period of our life.

In this case, the one without my mom.

And, soon thereafter, my brother’s suicide, still trying to process my father’s completion of suicide.

Marisa Renee Lee also said something else that I sat with:

“I became a different person after my mother died.”

I did too.

I realize I also became a different person after my dad died, and after my brother died. All of them changed me. And though I was not as close with my dad and brother, as I was my mother, and we had complicated and strained relationships at points, I still loved them. And we still had our good times and memories. With them too, I still have grief, or love with nowhere to go.

She also said something else that stuck with me: that we can’t really know what it is going to be like when they die, until they die.

It reminds me of that silly song—We don’t know what we got ‘til it’s gone.

Maybe it’s inevitable. But it’s sad. The gravity, the depth, the extreme…gone-ness that happens when they are really dead.

I knew my mother was at the end of her life, with advanced CHF and COPD. Still, when she was pronounced dead, it was like I couldn’t believe it had really happened and it rattled me, shook me to my core.

I had experienced deaths, long and drawn out, sudden and tragic, of people I loved. But you can never know the depth of the death of your mother…or your father…or your only sibling.

Marisa Renee Lee is right. This grief doesn’t end and it irrevocably changes us.

I think admitting this is key; it is part of the coping process, not pretending that it won’t alter us.

Such is… to sit with, to carry, and to journey on the path of grief.