GOOD GRIEF
“The culmination of love is grief. And yet we love, despite the inevitable. We open our hearts to it.”
(I don’t know the writer of this line. It’s from Faye in God of War, Ragnarok.)
Today’s quote is strong enough that I could probably get away with using nothing more… either that or my ideas are becoming increasingly limited.
If you’re not one for overused phrases, then the concept of “don’t be sad that it’s over, be glad that it happened” may turn you off of this immediately. Writers everywhere (almost certainly all of them), dead or alive, popular or not, have at some point written about the beauty that can be found in grief. Some are short and filled with catchy quotes, and others, tomes of generational wisdom. But, many of them orbit around the same idea as the above-quoted cliché, the idea that a simple shift in perspective can make loss a beautiful thing. That, to me, is annoying. And, not just annoying; when we’re actively experiencing loss, and the former coworker with whom you’ve spoken a total of 100 words hits you with a “They would want you to be happy”, annoyed isn’t exactly the word we’d use. Irate may be more accurate. I can’t speak for everyone, but surely I’m not alone in that.
For most, the face of grief is an ugly one; it’s weight, drudgery, pain, an illness from which it’s impossible to recover. Attempting to dance our way around it with cupcakes and platitudes may be of noble intention (positivity will always have its merits), yet, just like our love, grief is unconditional.
So, when I hear or read a quote like the one at the top of the page, or Queen Elizabeth’s “Grief is the price we pay for love”, I have a tendency to scoff at it as I would with anything so painfully melodramatic. But, I’ve come to understand that my frustration is duly unjustified. Thinking rationally, if there are any topics that warrant the attachment of cheesy banalities, love and death would probably be at the top of the list; they’re pretty impactful experiences. The more one sees it, the clearer it becomes that grief really is the outcome of love… it’s undeniable. The more I love, the more I grieve; the relationship is linear, so, not only is my aversion to romanticizing grief unnecessary and nihilistic… maybe it’s simply wrong. Maybe grief is romantic.
Maybe the true nature of our love for a person can only be discovered when they die. As dark and pessimistic as that sounds, when we start poking around in the crawlspace of our grief, we find evidence of love everywhere and it makes more and more sense. Love is such a difficult thing to understand, let alone explain, and maybe grief accomplishes exactly that.
Now, before this gets any more mushy and sentimental, I’d like to call on a glowing contradiction I’ve made here. I began with the acknowledgment of grief’s ugliness and then proceeded to kind of… make it pretty, the exact thing that I claimed to find obnoxious. Let me clarify: The concept that I’ve presented, that of grief being an honest indication of love, is beautiful at its core and one would be hard-pressed to argue against that. But, that shouldn't take away or distract from the remaining fact that grief and coping with loss is nothing if not difficult, exhausting, and at times debilitating. Both truths exist at once, for the presence of beauty doesn’t require the absence of distress. I’m claiming that it’s important to acknowledge both.
We know love when grief reveals its depth.
