On Grief

Punta del Diablo, Uruguay

Feeling is a very messy thing to do. The feelings of grief contain not 1 but a multitude of emotions that are as intense as they are varied. Forget the notion they’re to be done in neat steps, for some predetermined amount of time. 

Grief is tempestuous and, in vain, we attempt to lasso the storm. We try to reason with grief, seeking to predict its pattern to prepare for its course, not understanding it materializes in the waft of a long-since remembered smell, the tune of a song, in the sudden deja vu that sweeps you away to an old forgotten moment.

It ebbs & flows, sometimes creating an undercurrent that pulls you into its depths & pummels you with a debilitating wave you can’t get out from under.

The wise know that it will not actually drown you.

They know that the only way out is through.

To heal grief means to feel it in its entirety.

To hurt from the hollow space of what once filled you.

To be sliced by an unrelenting litany of lacerations. 

To hate anyone, everyone, & everything.

To lose life’s luster.

To be filled with inextinguishable rage.

It means to sit in the pain & discomfort until a favorable change of winds brings relief.

To accept what’s done is done & the past can’t be rewritten. 

The only thing promised in life is death & pain is embedded in our earthly contract. We decide how we tend to our wounds & salve the scars upon our skin. 

To live with loss is a great task, one that needs reinforcements. Under the folds of pain is tucked a reason that is greater than us. Purpose is most difficult to find, yet most freeing to uncover.

To find meaning is not to deny the injustice, but to soften the abrasion.

Whether that be to more deeply love & live or to use the pain as some cataclysmic force for revolution, it matters not the ‘what’ but the personal meaning drawn from the destruction.

Perhaps it is but proof of your deep capacity to love & your price for it.

Healing grief is never complete. It has holes, relapses, & many repetitions. 

In the 20 years I’ve lived without my father, I have found surrender, acceptance & purpose is perhaps the only way to find peace enduring the pain we’ve been ordered to carry.

Sobre todo, it is part of the collective experience, know that you are not suffering alone.