Please read this first distillation of grief one line at a time, pausing to close your eyes, to seek understanding of the personal meaning of that line within your current feelings. At any point in grief or just on daily life, revisit this first page and refresh your understanding. This is the most simplistic form of my distillation of grief, I will present variations for different specific situations that I have come to understand in my journeys.
A simple universal distillation of grief
- We grieve because we love.
- No Love, no grief.
- Deep love, deep and complicated grief.
- When we love someone, it is always possible that they might die before we die.
- The person we have loved has died.
- Our love for them doesn’t die.
- Our love for them isn’t meant to die.
- Grief is love continued after the death of one we have loved.
- Grief is the final responsibility for loving someone.
Love is the basis for every relationship that we will grieve, so love will be the key ingredient we seek in your distillation of your grief from loss.
What we seek is not so much your love for them, you are alive and have all of that already.
We need to explore and understand what you will miss about them, what was in the love that they gave you, and we find is the essence of their love for life, their love for you, the activities and interests that they loved in life and shared with you.
These are the essence of why you loved them, the many parts of their life that connected you to them emotionally, the parts of them that you will miss the most if you don’t carry them with you. These are the things we will distill and carry with us. We will discard the pain and the anger and carry only the love that we received from our lost loved one.
Sometimes we forget that we who are left to grieve are the lucky ones, and so we often make grief about us, about our pain that the loss has caused us, about how hard it will be to live without them.
We are the lucky ones because we live, we can and will remember, we can and will share the memories and lessons that they no longer can.
We who grieve have the honour of the responsibility to continue to love someone who has passed, and that it is we are the lucky ones.