What is my purpose for www.DistillingGrief.com?
April 11, 2023
by: Peter H. Ratcliffe
No good life, full of love, will likely escape the emotion of grief. We generally don’t talk much about grief in our day to day lives. Most of us have negative connotations surrounding grief, and I know those emotions very well from multiple journeys through grief surrounding unexpected and untimely death.
Elsewhere on this site you will find a more detailed explanation for Distilling Grief as a concept, but the short one is that distillation is a process of refining and purifying things. When we distill things we remove the parts we don’t want or need, reducing the size and increasing the value of what we choose to keep.
It seems fitting to start this statement of purpose with my most common distillation of grief, something I spontaneously adapt when writing (or speaking) to someone experiencing grief.
Grief Is Love
- We grieve because we love
- No love, no grief. Deep love, deep and complex grief.
- When we love someone, there is always the possibility that one of us will die before the other.
- The person we have loved has died, our love for them hasn’t died.
- We don’t wish to forget, we want to continue our love for them.
- Grief is the final responsibility for loving someone.
- Grief is an evolved emotion, attached directly to love.
- Grief is a teacher, it reminds us of the purpose and depth of love, and also that our lives are finite.
- The lessons and memories that we can find in grief are meant to be cherished and shared and not forgotten.
With much time and thought, as well as encouragement from those who have helped me and those who I have helped, I am currently writing an eBook that will be downloadable without cost. The chapters of that eBook will expand on many of the posts that I have planned for this blog, so the eBook and blog will work together or apart.
It’s a big ask, but if I had one purpose here, it would be to make more people comfortable with the grief that they experience, give more purpose and meaning to the grief that they feel, and to enrich their lives and the lives of those around them in the most comfortable grief that they can find for each loss in their lives.
Finally, this blog and eBook should serve as a guide, a map of the journey of grief, for those who love me, when they will eventually grieve me and others that they have and will love.