What If Grief Needs More Life, Not Less?

Grief is uncomfortable. It can be relentless. And it has a way of showing up whenever the hell it wants to.

There's no schedule for it. No predictable path. You can be moving through your life believing you're doing just fine, when something – a song place, a memory, even a scent, brings it right back.

I've often thought about the idea that grief is simply love with nowhere to go.

And if that's true, perhaps the question isn't always, how do I get through this?

Maybe sometimes the better question is:

Where does all that love go now?

I was reminded of this one day on my walk while watching a seagull, it was faced away from the ocean. Standing quietly on the rocks, seemingly contemplating the ocean behind it and the scenery in front. There was something about the moment that stayed with me.

It made me wonder how often, especially in grief, we lose touch of our own nature.

We can become so focused on understanding what we're feeling, managing it, or trying to find our way through it that we forget there are also instincts in us that knows when to be still, when retreat, and eventually, when to move again.

Grief asks for rest. It asked for quiet. It asked us to honor what has been lost.

But I've also come to believe that grief eventually ask something else of us.

It asks us to keep living.

Not because the person or the life we love matters less. Or because we've "moved on." And certainly not because grief has disappeared.

But because all of that love still needs somewhere to go.

Maybe it goes into the people who are still here. Into friendships. Into family. Into work that matters. Travel, beauty, laughter, curiosity, movement, nature – or into parts of ourselves that we haven't yet discovered.

That's when another question began to occur to me:

What if grief needs more life not less?

There is difference in trying to get over grief and learning how to carry it while continuing to expand your life - and allowing what we have loved to become part of who we are moving towards.

After significant loss, we often talk about rebuilding. But I'm not sure rebuilding is always the right word. We aren't reconstructing the life we had. And we certainly aren't replacing the person or experience we've lost.

We are learning how to live a life that has been changed by love and changed by loss.

That takes time. Lots of time.

It also takes a certain amount of courage to allow pleasure back in. To become curious again. To discover that experiencing joy has not diminished the depth of what – or whom – we have loved.

Because – the love doesn't disappear.

It finds somewhere new to live.

And maybe, little by little, so do we.

With love,

Angelese