The Work of Grief
Grieving is ultimately about learning to love and live in a new way, whether or not we want to, whether or not we know how, because it's what we're given to do.
We might begin to love on our own, secretly, but new vistas open up when love is acknowledged, reciprocated, and shared over time. It's like completing a circuit: energy actively flows between those who share love and changes so many aspects of our lives that we can't even compute them all. A morning kiss. A pat on the shoulder. A call, a text out of the blue. Talking over meals. Doing chores together. All those moments shared alongside someone we can touch, hear, and smell. After a while, we can anticipate how they'll react to many things, but we still want to elicit reactions anyway because their responses are just what we want to see. The give and take is what we need.
Death does not put an end to loving or the need for love, but for those left behind, it seems to cut off the flow of that life-giving element. What ran forward and back now only seems to flow in one direction toward a bottomless void. If they still exist and answer back, we cannot sense it. The faces and voices that lifted our spirits are nowhere to be found; the moments once shared feel even more empty in their absence. And it hurts so much because there's so much love left, so much we want to share, and one person in all the world we want to share it with.
The work of grief is heart work, and it can be hard work. It's too easy to shut down, stubbornly cling to the past, or cover our hurt with rage at things we cannot change. Because then we don't have to deal with the real issue: we need to change what we do and continue without their immediate physical presence. Love and life continue, in a different way. Instead of an active exchange with that person, we must reroute the flow - to their memory, ourself, and others.
Because their memory is proof eternal that we can love and be enriched thereby, and our relationship with them is not ended. They still have more to teach us, and we can still learn from them. And the memory of their love is proof that we can be loved, that we deserve it, and that it can indeed enrich our lives. Since they would want us to live well, we are called upon to relearn how to do that. We must teach ourselves to mourn our loss and share love elsewhere. This isn't a betrayal; it's spreading the gifts they gave us. Completing new circuits with the energy they engendered in us. Making the best of them an integral and indelible part of our present and future.
Because death turns love into an act of faith and life isn't lived without loving someone, somewhere. The mystery of death is that no one knows how beings so vibrant can suddenly end; the mystery of life is no one knows how we can keep going, but we do. Grief is how our psyches wrestle with the gaps a loss creates; it turns us inward to contemplate the bottom and the end we will reach someday. Loving is how we transform grief into a lasting commitment to those we've lost and the betterment of our own lives - it expands us outward and inward and shows us the best and highest we can still achieve. Loving is how we learn to live again.