Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief
When we love deeply, we mourn deeply; extraordinary grief is an expression of extraordinary love.
In a grieving family, suffering happens at the individual and collective levels. Every person is grieving and acting out that grief in their own way, and each person is enacting that grief in relationship to others.
^my mom and I ‘joked’ about how we take turns crying
Like love, grief can’t be constrained by time and space.
Grief is a process of expansion and contraction.
For all who love, suffering is inevitable.
I assert that being happy does not mean we do not feel pain or grief or sadness — successively or, often, simultaneously. Sorrow and contentment, grief and beauty, longing and surrender coexist in the realm of sadness. This is called the unity of opposites, and it liberates us from a myopic, dualistic view of our emotions as either/or.
We are not either happy or sad. We are not either grieving or grateful. We are not either content or despairing. We are both/and.
In early grief it is hard if not impossible to imagine ever being happy again, and yet, slowly, moments in touch with joy accrue by seconds and minutes and, later, hours or even days of contentment. Gradually, we regain the capacity to feel joyful, and we feel this in the same space as grieving.
The word emotion has its roots in the Latin movere and emovere meaning “to move through” and “to move out.” Our emotions move in us, move through us, and move between us. And when we allow them to move freely, they change, perhaps scarcely and perhaps gradually — but inevitably.
This is grief’s most piercing message: there is no way around — the only way is through.
grief intensity ~ ability to cope with grief
goal is to increase the latter, not decrease the former
Feel grateful but don’t force gratitude.
self-care categories: self-expression (show our feelings), self-awareness (pay attention, notice, and listen deeply to all aspects of self), connection and interconnection (with others, animals, nature, the world, and ourself), physicality (sleep, nutrition, exercise, dance, and even, when ready, play), and kindness (bring love to others and bring it back around to ourselves)
Self-care also means saying no when necessary. When grieving, we need to give ourselves permission to put our own needs first for a while.
Self-care means attending to our body, mind, and heart in the wake of loss, but we must be careful to not let this become yet another form of distraction — like any other distraction that mindlessly takes us away from painful feelings.
The trees less likely to break are those that are able to sway with the wind.
On special occasions, death anniversaries, and sometimes just an ordinary day when the sun is shining and the clouds are floating and the earth is rotating — on a day like any other — a pang will strike my heart, and I feel the collapse of a moment around me. Not as often as in the early days, not as lasting as in the early days, but still, it comes. And I surrender because long past the early days, grief’s shadow still remains.
Some claim that it is time that heals, but I see this process a bit differently. Certainly, time allows some necessary space, a kind of respite, from the despair of early grief. Personally, though, I don’t actually feel that my grief has diminished over time. […] The idea that grief incrementally weakens by the mere passage of time has not been my truth. Nor would I wish it to be. It isn’t how much time has passed that counts. It’s what we — and others around us — do with that time.
The weight I needed to bear never changed — only my ability to carry it.
The thing about grief is that there isn’t a place or time at which we arrive once-and-for-all at peace, or healing, or completion. Grief is a process, an unending, long and winding road.
In being with grief, our hearts are turned primarily inward with a focus on the self.
I’ve always found Kierkegaard’s Works of Love comforting and validating. In it, he says that remembering our dead epitomizes the most unselfish, freest, and most faithful type of love — a love willing to suffer for itself, so that it can continue to exist. It is unselfish because it is unrequited […] It is freest because there is no coercion or obligation to continue loving the dead; it can only be an act of choice. It is faithful because it requires devotion; for neither affection, nor strength, nor kindness can be returned from one who has died.
surfing ~ grieving ~ surrender to the wave
Suffering endured becomes compassion expressed.
Grieving becomes giving.
Those who have deeply suffered understand life in ways others cannot: they know the only way to attain authentic and lasting contentment is to turn our hearts outward in service to those who are suffering as we have suffered.
generational trauma — it was a feedback loop of dysfunction from which she did not know how to extricate herself.
omg my jaw dropped upon reading p. 200 when the English mastiff owner’s name was also Cheyenne (author’s dead daughter); also on p. 212 the other passengers on the train?! not sure if Cheyenne is just a very common name in the Southwest but still
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“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” — James Baldwin
“It is one’s duty to love those we do not see. but also those we do see.” — Søren Kierkegaard
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I wonder how dad and my grandparents felt/coped after losing his younger brother/their second? third? son but I’m a little too scared to ask.
