Grief & Morning: The Greatest Healing Experience?

The residue of loss remains, a shadow of love over memory, a splinter of love that stays caught in the heart.

Shakespeare speaks of the proofs of love being more important than showy words, and I wonder if grief and the mourning that follows aren’t the most precious proofs of all. Ask yourself in a quiet moment, who will be there when you die? Who will stand by your grave and sob? We stood by Lucy’s as dozens of friends spoke beautifully about her life—she was lucky in intimates, if not with men. As I sat there among her friends, the love she’d left was palpable, proved by the wound it left behind. None of us was immune to this pain; we were pissed off and grief-stricken over this waste, racked with questions, even afraid. If someone as courageous as Lucy, a role model for thousands of readers as a survivor of childhood cancer, could give up and fall, then how far were we ourselves from the edge?

Grief may be the greatest healing experience of a lifetime. It’s certainly one of the hottest fires we will encounter. It penetrates the hard layers of our self-protection, plunges us into the sadness, fear, and despair we have tried so hard to avoid. Grief is unpredictable, uncontrollable. There are no shortcuts around grief. The only way is right through the middle. Some say time heals, but that’s a half-truth. Time alone doesn’t heal. Time and attention heal.

In grief we access parts of ourselves that were somehow unavailable to us in the past. With awareness, the journey through grief becomes a path to wholeness. Grief can lead us to a profound understanding that reaches beyond our individual loss. It opens us to the most essential truth of our lives: the truth of impermanence, the causes of suffering, and the illusion of separateness. When we meet these experiences with mercy and awareness, we begin to appreciate that we are more than the grief. We are what the grief is moving through. In the end, we may still fear death, but we don’t fear living nearly as much. In surrendering to our grief, we have learned to give ourselves more fully to life.