Could You Summon Terrible Grief to Discover Powerful Love?
Our grief is only as wild and immeasurable as our love
Tonight, my grief is a wild, roaring thing, and I am weeping alone in a quiet house. I have no one to blame but myself. After all, I summoned it here.
It was an impulse, really. I was craving something sweet and feeling unsettled, and I saw a bag of treats on the counter. I sorted through it, and my fingers stalled on a small Milky Way bar. I touched it, and I could suddenly feel my father’s mother stuffing them in the pocket of a leather jacket she gave me. The same leather jacket, worn and falling to pieces, hangs in my closet, and I cannot get rid of it. If I checked the pockets, I might find a candy bar there now.
Lately, I am visited by both of my grandmothers. They are everywhere, so close I could almost reach out and touch them. I welcome the memories but summoning them is like pressing against a still bruised and hurting place. I can’t stop myself.
The pain is a reminder of the love.
The love is a reminder of the pain.
I lost my two grandmothers four times in total. Twice to dementia. Twice to death. I grieved long before they left this world. I have lost them four times, and it feels like every time I remember, I lose them again.
Summon Grief
I take out the Milky Way — a candy bar I’ve never enjoyed and could not admit to my grandmother who took such joy in giving them to me — and I place it in my mouth. I am weeping before I can even choke it down because she is present in that moment and in all the ones that came before.
My mother’s mother is summoned by a song, one I listened to when I knew that I was going up to see her for the last time in life and one I listened to on the long drive home from her funeral days later. It’s The National’s About Today, and I play it as a release valve to the grief. She, too, is everywhere. I ate the piece of chocolate and turned on the song, and my grandmothers came back to me.
I have long thought that I am filled to the breaking point with grief, but it occurs to me now that I am filled with love. I’m not only summoning the pain to me when I choose to remember or when I weep in the near darkness of a silent house on a rare weekend completely alone. I am summoning the love. I am reminding myself of the memories. I am honoring and affirming their place in my life.
Connect to Love
I have always recognized the weight of loss in my life, but I don’t think I ever quite stood back and observed in awe the amount of love I hold in my body. But the Universe keeps reminding me. There are reminders in the spider I freed rather than killing and the wasp that I rescued from my playful puppy — the way I saw their lives and valued them as much as my own. There are reminders in the way windchimes summon the presence of my great-grandmother and how the sound of courthouse bells tolling nearby are echoes of my great-grandfather’s grandfather clock. I once counted these as losses, but I know now that I have filled myself up with love.
I spoke to a friend today about how I am afraid of loving again when I have experienced such devastating loss, but I tasted chocolate and listened to a song and remembered that loving well is the price we pay to live fully in this world. I’d be no better off shielding myself from it, and in truth, doing so would only fill me with more pain.
My grief is a wild and roaring thing because my love is, too. To let one loose is to acknowledge the other.
The night grows dark early, tears are drying on my face, and I play the song again. The candy wrapper lies discarded on the counter. My dog, unsettled by my weeping, settles back down to the familiar rhythm of my words striking the keys, and I reach for what I wanted to say. Then, I find it.
Sometimes, we need to summon the pain to reconnect with just how fiercely we loved. Yet, I didn’t stay focused on the sharp edge of the loss. Instead, I let the keening wail of grief quiet into a wave of love. I remembered all that I learned from them. I took comfort in the connection and rode that overwhelming grief into an open and abundant sense of love.
Face and Embrace Grief
I fear we run too much from grief. We try to deny it and distract ourselves from it. We’re ashamed when it lasts too long, and yet, we can’t even say why we think grief should have an expiration date any more than love. Yet, it demands to be faced. It doesn’t go away just because we won’t look closely at it. Grief creeps up on us when we least expect it, sneaking in through the cracks in our defenses.
We should spend more time embracing grief. If I’ve learned anything in therapy, it’s that we have to fully experience our feelings if we’re ever to have a hope of healing. I didn’t avoid the grief this time. I took out the candy bar. I played the song. I walked right into it with open arms because I needed a moment to remember and to cry because I came from those two strong, beautiful women. I love them, and it’s not past tense. It occurred to me that they love me — that’s not past tense either.
Love is timeless and immeasurable.
Crying about it won’t break us, but maybe not crying about it does. I wonder how many unhealthy habits I picked up trying to stuff away the discomfort of my feelings. I wonder how often I loved someone else less so that they could not hurt me more.
Summon the Grief, But Savor the Memories
Life is filled with opportunities to remember love, but we often choose to reach for pain instead. I have struggled to make peace with loves lost, but I wonder now how much of that struggle could have been prevented if I’d leaned into both love and grief rather than away from them.
We can summon the grief easily with our senses: a scent that evokes a lover, a song that brings back a friend, a taste that recalls a recipe attached to someone we love, a flower that will only ever remind us of that one special person, or the feel of a hug that is reminiscent of one before. Every time we summon a memory, we have the opportunity to choose our focus.
A bittersweet memory is only as bitter or as sweet as we decide it will be. A loss doesn’t have to eclipse the love.
Become Love, Accept Loss
After all these years of counting up losses, I’m finally seeing just how much love I’ve given and received. It’s incalculable. I decide to spend some time focused on those memories even if a great many of them come with pain.
To become love — to give it as fully as I’m capable — I need to accept loss.
I need to remember that there are no guarantees. As an unsuitable lover often reminds me, the more we love, the more we stand to lose. Yet, I am opening myself to loving harder in the face of such terrible loss because somewhere between weeping over something so much bigger than a candy bar, I finally accessed the wellspring of love hidden in the ache of grief.
Those women who were my grandmothers deserve every tear. They deserve to be missed quite desperately, and it speaks well of them that they left people behind who would feel their absence in such a powerful way. How can I love any less?
I decide to show love for the trapped spider and injured wasp. They once summoned fear but now draw on a deeper sense of compassion for other living creatures. I decide to love the unsuitable lover who is so quick to remind me that pain will come when one or both of us finally moves on, which we both readily admit is inevitable. It doesn’t stop me from being open and loving in the meantime.
Instead of counting up all the loss and all the ones who didn’t love me, I count my children and my friends. I count my family — the ones still living and the ones who are gone. I count my puppy, a soft presence beside me.
There is more love than I ever knew and just as much grief as I feared, and yet it does not break me. In this moment, I am stronger and softer than I’ve ever been before.
Summoning the grief isn’t the worst thing we can do if it also brings with it a reminder of all the love. As courage requires vulnerability and vulnerability requires courage, love and pain are equally intertwined. Oh, how I used to fear it! Tonight, I work through the shadows and finally connect with the light and acknowledge that one cannot exist without the other.
The grief passes like a storm, and I am left with the love. There’s a curious peace knowing it hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s a part of who I am, and I don’t try to run from it. I don’t tell myself not to feel it. I’m not ashamed of how hard I cried or how much I feel anymore.
Tonight, my love is a wild, roaring thing, and I am grateful for it.
