Grief Is Love's Parting Gift

Grief is a feeling that many often avoid. Even in the writing of this blog - it may be my favourite quote of all of them - and yet each month I think: next month will be better. There's a large piece of wanting to get it right in a conversation on grief. There is also a part that requires further processing (always).

Some experience grief at an early age and some experience it later in life. For those who are living, there aren't many that escape the confounds of grief. If you do, it has meant that those who once surrounded you, carry it instead.

For those who have experienced early loss, grief is a devastation that hits differently. There is not yet a full foundational schema to process and consolidate your grief. You will see this with early childhood trauma, such as abuse, neglect and abandonment (to name only a few). It is not only our early experience that impacts us, but how our body makes sense of, and stores the information. We see this in terms of attachment patterns and in extreme cases, attachment disorder.

How a child makes sense of and stores the information largely depends on whether the adults in their lives support them in healthy ways, making sense of their early life experience. As adults we sometimes want to tip toe around the pain, hoping that time will heal. In all of my experience both personally and professionally: time does not heal. Avoiding talking about significant losses for a child only makes things worse; sound advice that can also be applied to adult relationships.

Until we come to acknowledge that grief is a friend, we will remain disconnected from our ability to process and move forward. Grief doesn't leave us, however we can choose to transform our grief. How we choose to transform our grief says a lot about our fears, hopes and dreams. When grief arrives it often enhances fear and worry. As it stays there focused more on fear and worry, our hopes and dreams seem far off in the distance.

What if the only way back to hope, is by walking through fear? Looking it in the eye. Sitting with the depth of the pain of grief.

Have you ever experienced a grief that no one understood, or perhaps a grief that wasn't socially acceptable to share even in the confidence of a close friend? It's lonely and isolating. This is something known as disenfranchised grief. The more our pain can be shared and understood, the less likely we are to hold onto it. That's the key to grief, both in therapy, and relationally. As someone is seen, as they feel understood, they don't hold the pain so tightly.

When someone holds onto the pain for too long, it can turn into something called complex or traumatic grief. This is where it has become stuck. A part of it is too scary to share. When I sit in a room with someone, I often scan for the unseen pieces of their lives, the narrative that goes unheard. As I listen for fears, I can simultaneously know the hidden grief. Fear becomes secondary to the stronghold of grief. Grief acknowledged is tangible to process.

It's not lost on me that today is mother's day, as I write this blog about grief. Grief is in many ways synonymous with motherhood, even if you walk the road of raising a strong and healthy child. To do it well, you walk the path of slowly letting go and setting them free. Our hearts are never fully ready.

There are also so many circumstances that aren't the perceived road of mothering. There are many other roads of motherhood that bring on categorical spaces of grief. There are single mothers, motherless children, children with special needs that will always need the role of their mother in a different way, aunties that love our children (some that want their own and some who don't), mothers who have said goodbye too soon to their children (in utero, at birth, in the first years of life, as a child, as a teen, or an adult), etc.

I carry my own grief in motherhood, in all its uniqueness, like many. I wake up everyday with gratitude to say good morning to my children, knowing a family is something at one point in my life I only dreamed of. It directs me to make choices around how I choose to mother my own children: with strength, patience, conviction, protection, love and truth.

I am overjoyed to share my days with my children and yet, there is never a day where it is lost on me that our train rides inevitably do not meet the final destination at the same time. It means there is a goodbye.

For every hello, there is always a goodbye.

It may only come in the form of see you later. The space and distance from what was once connection and presence will be felt. I do know that when that day comes, it will be hard because I loved hard.

And it was worth it.

How lucky I am to have loved... Yes. And we don't always choose who we love. We aren't always lucky. It may not always feel worth the pain relationally in that moment. It may not always be. That's okay. Our ability to love can remain intact as we remain open to both pain and joy.

Even in the moments where the choice to love was not as evident, or a choice at all... grief is love's parting gift. It is both bitter and sweet. Sometimes one is more faint than the other. We can try to escape a lot of things in a lifetime but grief is not one of them. It is the very essence of knowing what it is like to have something and to loose it.

Where there is great grief, there is great love.