Grief as a Companion
Imagine that every day, someone is loudly banging on your front door. The hammering persists day after day, hour by hour. Many months pass, and you notice that the noise has reduced to a dull knock. It remains, but softer now. The knocking continues for several weeks until one day, it suddenly stops. Silence.
“Finally, it’s over,” you sigh with relief.
The next day, the fierce banging returns, worse than ever. Your heart plummets. It hurts again. Grief is like that.
There are many emotions that come up when we experience grief. For me, I struggle with dread. Dread is the sister of hopelessness; she insists we stay close while I insist on showing her an obscene gesture.
Unexpected guests are, frankly, unwelcome. Dread has this great habit of visiting whenever she likes, especially when I haven’t tidied the house or brewed my morning coffee. Grief comes in right after her; if dread barges in the door, grief rushes in like a wave.
Rather than fear grief, we can reframe it as the sincerest compliment we can give ourselves:
To grieve deeply is to love deeply.
I know that doesn’t take away the pain, but I hope it lightens the load.
The dialogue surrounding grief concentrates on loss, but personally, I think grief is an experience of robbery. It is unjust. We mourn the way our lives are “supposed” to be, before we experienced theft.
Grief has an amazing talent to age us instantly, stripping away our innocence and naivety. It marks a definitive before-and-after in our lives; we are never the same, but we can use it to become something magnificent. Imagine if we alchemized sorrow to increase our capacity for love, kindness, forgiveness, and compassion.
Let’s stop waiting for grief to end. If we truly believe grief is an expression of love, then we should expect it to journey with us. Does that mean we live life indefinitely on pause? No.
When grief knocks at the door again, answer with courage. Welcome her in. In the silence that follows, you smile, not because she left, but because you are becoming more.