All grief is a form of love.
That realization has helped me process grief as nothing else quite has. On the one hand, the pain of grief must be felt bare and ugly and it seems a betrayal of the one we grieve to try to find a redemptive aspect to their loss. But on the other hand, to feel grief as love is to feel grief at it’s truest. There would be no pain if there were no love. Even in the most complicated of griefs… there is at least a love for what should have been. And, I don’t know… I guess to think of the tears streaming down my face as tears of love allows me to feel a connection to the ones for which I grieve… to feel my love for them lives on even in that grief rather than that love being dead with them. Is this an escape from reality if it is a reality?
All grief is a form of love.
This is a lesson I did not expect to learn in my young adulthood. A lesson I did not expect to learn when I met a young man battling the return of cancer. The battle scars were in the tension of his forehead, in the intensity of his eyes, and in the chemo ports running into his chest– which he pulled down his shirt collar to show me as he handed me his copy of Khalil Gibran and told me to read:
“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
I’ve thought of that moment so many times since– both of the poetry of his courage to find a redemptive aspect to his pain and of the poetry of Gibran. How could either of us know how I would need both his courage and that line of poetry? Because when he shared those words with me, it was before the shipwreck which took a friend’s life. It was before losing a young friend to a rare cancer. And before suicide took an even younger friend. And murder took one younger yet. And then my grandpa slipped away in the haze of my grief.
And it was before the depression from being unable to confront those losses distanced me from so many of my friends and family– what would have been my support system if the space between us had not become too far to lean across. And it was before that depression made me a stranger even to myself… leaving me fumbling through life looking for what I used to feel. Searching for feelings difficult to find again because I didn’t even remember how what I used to feel felt. So life became like looking for where I put my glasses without even knowing what glasses looked like… yet knowing full well I couldn’t see.
I felt like a cicada. Not the cicadas alive with their cacophonous buzzing, but the cicadas on the bark of trees in the Fall. I felt like the shell of the cicada… who from a distance looks intact and fully functioning, but as you get closer you realize is just held onto the tree with some weird sort of nature glue, not life. Indeed, I felt like, to anyone who took just a cursory glance at my life, it looked as though nothing had changed… but to anyone who bothered to get close enough, they would see the hollowness of my shell. And to anyone who dared to even touch me, they would find how crunchy the shell of myself was, how easy I would be to crush.
I will be honest, in case it is an experience which others may connect with as well, and say, I also felt like a very judged cicada. I felt I hid my struggles so well that people were making normal demands on me and becoming angry when I couldn’t meet them… without bothering to approach my tree and see me as the shell of myself. Grief and depression can make you self-absorbed because it takes all you have to just hold yourself together. Indeed, the burden of grief can be so great than any other demand can be overwhelming. So if people think you are just a healthy, live cicada, they will find you selfish– rather than a surviving shell.
Indeed, I felt so judged in my grief to the point I dearly wished that people still wore mourning clothes. That way, with a simple change of clothing, you could strategically and unobtrusively announce your delicate state to the world with a garment of mourning simply asking: please, handle with care. That way you wouldn’t just have people giving you odd looks or demanding even very little of you. And then, when you felt sufficiently able to respond to the everyday demands of society and the world, you would simply set those mourning clothes aside and bucker up.
But we don’t don black. Indeed, we do so little to facilitate the grieving process when one of the cruelest aspect of grief is how the world just goes on like normal. And repression brings depression. But our minds know how to help us. Even with the emotional shutdown triggered by shock… our minds know when we can feel again. And when, years after the fact, I woke up crying from nightmares of shipwrecks… those tears helped me recognize and feel my grief. And when I realized that my grief was a form of love and that I could love my friends by grieving them, I could grieve. And I could heal.
So I write this at a time of memorialization of loss, in order to lean into grief. To let that grief carve the caverns that will be filled with deeper joy and to feel all the depth and width of love… even the grief. And I write it because one of the most healing parts of my journey through grief was simply others sharing that journey too… putting into words what I felt but didn’t yet know how to express. They shared words which made me feel less alone.
Yet I do hesitate to write about grief, because most of the positive feedback I get in life is about how joyful I can be. Which is actually part of what made processing grief more difficult: I felt I was disappointing people by not being joyful. But… we all get to be human. And while my joy may make you feel better in the moment… it will not help you in your grief the same way sharing the sadness will. So I may not be able to share joy in the moment… but let me, if you need it, help you let your sorrow carve deep into your being so that you will one day have deeper joy too. It might not feel good… but let us not limit love and instead embrace all of love and life together. Even grief. And carve our caverns deep.