The interconnected world of grief and love

At the end of a life, we often ask ourselves “why.” Why did they have to go? Why did we get so close to someone/something? Why didn’t we spend more time with them? Why does it hurt so much? Love is a beautiful, chaotic, life-giving and life-altering thing. When we can’t fully express our love and receive it the way we used to, it leaves us feeling empty, sad, hurt.

Grief doesn’t discriminate. You can grieve any loss, be it a relationship, a person, a job, yourself, the future; we all grieve different things and in our own ways. Some days it’s heavy, some days we don’t feel it. Some days it creeps up and feels as fresh as the first day it set in. Some of us will spend hours staring at the wall, some of us will make art, some will cry, or yell, or dance. It gets expressed however it decides to come out, whether internally or externally, no matter where we are or what’s going on.

Today I wanted to remind you that however you get through it, it’s okay.

It’s okay if you put all their stuff away and it’s okay if you decide to keep it out. It’s okay if you wear the same shirt for 2 weeks and it’s okay if you go shopping. It’s okay if you cried hard in the middle of the supermarket and it’s okay if you only cried for an hour after you first heard the news.

There will be days you feel great, days you feel okay, and days where you don’t feel okay at all. It’s not much but from me to you, you’re not doing it wrong. I wish I could tell you that it goes away but it never really does, you just experience and express it differently with time.

A best friend of mine said that the tears we shed while grieving are “liquid love.” Because of that and the Andrew Garfield quote on grief being our unexpressed love, it reminded me that love is at the root of it all. Just like grief, we express our love differently with time too.