Grief
“Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.”
Grief does not change you, it only reveals who you are. Over the course of my life I have experienced the deaths of many loved ones and though the immediate sting varied in intensity, the pain still enveloped me with a sense of disaster and hopelessness.
In my losses I have been made keenly aware that the measure of love determined the level of suffering and that time is not the remedy for healing, but only a vehicle to adjust to a “new normal”. Whether it be a parent, spouse, child or sibling, the loss awakens you to a deeper understanding of how much more you could’ve given and how your imperfect love could still fill their heart with a sense that they were important to someone.
The reality is that you will always grieve. Time will not bring healing from the loss of a loved one; you will only learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same and you shouldn’t be. The birth of a loved one is a life-changing experience, and so should be the death of a loved one. It should be the trajectory that makes us better examples, better heroes, better men. Losing a loved one should bring you to your knees, and not from the pain of the loss, but from the gratitude of having been able to love someone so significantly in their lifetime, and to expect the pain of death to cease would be to disrespect the gift of life.
Grief can be a burden, but it can also be an anchor that holds you in place to remind you of just how fragile and precious life is. It is the weight that keeps you firmly planted to propel you to live in an exalted and enhanced way of loving others. If you believe you could not live with such a pain I am sorry, such pain is not lived with, it is only endured. Grief is the agony of an instant, but to indulge yourself in grief is the blunder of a lifetime. Heartache has it’s designated time in our lives and if you carry the pain too long, then the world becomes the enemy and you can find yourself in a perpetual downward spiral of loneliness, despair, and disappointment. Giving up your grief is yet another kind of mandatory death required for the living.
When you lose someone you love, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with that particular loved one, the more difficult the healing will be and the struggle is the more their memory feels like home, the more your mind finds its way back to them when it wanders. Those who are capable of intense love will also suffer intense sorrow, but this same necessity and strength of love serves to counteract grief and can bring healing if allowed.
Death abducts the dying and grief steals from the living. We perpetuate death by neglecting those that are left behind then we ask of God innocently to take away this grief. But it belongs to you. Only time and tears lessens grief; that is what grief is, just as love is unique, treasured and sought after. It may be another year without a loved one, but the truth of the Gospel tell us, it may be another year without them but it’s another year closer to being with them again in a place where time no longer exists.
Grief needs an outlet to bring about the healing you desperately seek. Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak only burdens the heart with words that were always meant to be spoken to the one you loved, but never were. Grief is not intended to be a place to exist, only a natural passageway you will need to travel to avoid becoming another casualty to those who are grieving with you.