Love and Grief Are a Package Deal
Grieving is exhausting, scary, confusing and very lonely. And grief can make us feels like we are going crazy. Literally crazy. Our brains are trying to very hard make sense of something that makes no sense and they can go into overload leaving us feeling out of control.
Thats because when someone we love dies, a part of us die with them. There is no end to the tears and no strength to face another day, only an overwhelming loneliness and endless doubts that we will be able to survive this. It’s like someone cut off our limbs or plucked our eyes out.
The outside world becomes a scary and disorienting place. Our internal world becomes muddled up, suffocating, unpredictable.
No one understands, we least of all. People we could count on, suddenly feel like strangers and we feel like strangers in our own skin. Anything that anyone says “trying to help” just offends and wounds us further.
Things we treasured no longer bring us joy. We may look like we are functioning on the outside, but inside we are on autopilot, a walking dead of a different kind. We feel utterly alone in a world where everyone is smiling, and shopping, and drinking lattes…
We can’t eat or we eat too much, we barely sleep or we sleep as someone in a coma. It’s hard to concentrate or to make simple decisions because we just don’t give a shit about anything anymore, but the next minute we may have a consuming urge to control every little detail of every little thing.
We feel as if we are loosing our minds as day and night we are thrusted into a tsunami of excruciating pain, emotionally, physically, mentally, spiritually.
Nothing makes sense. No one can help.
No one can make it better or make it go away. We don’t want to be in pain but we we don’t want to stop grieving either. It’s shit, it's awful and it can’t be fixed, but we can give ourselves permission to hurt and to be okay with not being okay. And we have compassion on ourselves as we allow the grief to play its part in our lives. Yes, you heard me right. Grief has an important part to play in our lives. Because love and grief come as a package. We can’t have one without the other.
When we love someone, we will grieve at one point or another. This crazy grief that invaded our lives is here to stay because we chose love. This crazy grief demands to be heard because love doesn’t died with a persons last breath. This crazy grief is unique to each of us because our relationship with the person we love is unique too. This crazy grief does have a part to play and its up to us to figure it out because no one cat tell us what it is. No one can grieve for us and no one grieves like anyone else.
Our part is to embrace our grief so that we won’t live the rest of our lives grieving. Our part is to slowly become strong enough to carry this crazy grief so that we neither have to move on leaving our loved ones behind, nor be suffocated by it. And maybe, this crazy grief may eventually help us to learn how to continue love those we love in their absence. very