Grief as a form of love 🆙

I read somewhere recently that grief is a form of love. I thought about this for a long time, since the phrase itself seems so contradictory in the universe of our desires.

We want all forms of love, but we don't want grief, so how could it be a form of love?

There is an extensive literature on the subject, but like other deeper feelings, this is one of those who only know who feels.

Regardless of the process or stage that the individual is in when they are grieving, perhaps few will be able to describe this feeling accurately. The impotence in the face of a fact about which we have no recourse or solution, the difficulty in accepting the loss, whatever it may be, are beyond words.

And it couldn't be different, since it's not an exact feeling. It is something unique and extremely personal, whatever the circumstances, the support system received, the nature of the death or even the social context.

Personally, when I talk about grief, I think of my little sister.

Sudden and devastating, which from its announcement to its ending took long, interminable and suffocating 8 days, his farewell to this world brought deep reflections and powerful transformations, as most people who go through this must, I imagine.

In my personal experience, as she is my sister, someone you never think about saying goodbye to, especially when you are younger, it took me a long time to accept that we have a rather treacherous, albeit unconscious, chronological expectation.

Not that I had any feelings of revolt or any loss of faith as many do. It was more of a feeling of “surprise”, of the unexpected, not for the loss itself, but for being my younger sister. There was something wrong with the natural order of things.

Even though we know that there is no such order to leave, unconsciously we are always preparing to say goodbye to those who arrived before us, not to those who arrived later.

This thought leads me to mothers who lose their children, perhaps this is the cruelest form of mourning that can exist. Then I go back to the initial sentence, the one about grief being a form of love.

The person who is gone becomes the one who is able to make us feel happy and unhappy at the same time. For a long time it is impossible to go through the annual calendar without the presence of absence. All dates gain new meaning and in this way, I believe, a new way of loving is born.

Grief as a form of love

As the memory of a loved one allows us to relive their history and often gather other people around the same memory, we reproduce in ourselves the feeling of well-being that life allowed us to feel.

Although at that same moment the nostalgia takes on almost material contours, a feeling of great intensity, which causes pain for the lack and joy for having been part of this history, is able to balance our lives and make this moment become something much greater. .

In my case, my beliefs helped me to live with the distance, I prefer that term to saying loss, because in fact I believe that we are just in different dimensions and I hope to see it again at the right time.

However, on a more rational analysis, I know that no one loves someone less just because that person is gone. I understand this process as a new phase of love and death does not interrupt the feeling. And feelings are still bigger than the facts of life.