The Thing With Grief…
The thing with grief is that it electrifies you. It causes everything in front of you to pause, like a slideshow that slows down, all of the details that have been in plain sight the entire time but have been ignored, suddenly become clear to you. You get a taste of reality through grief and while you are experiencing this brand-new world that has always existed, you can taste the most agonizing truth at that precise moment:
Nothing will ever be the same.
The insurmountable pain creates some kind of distinctive division between the bullshit and what to truly cherish, you wonder how you ever spent time and energy on some things rather than melting all of your being in the present moments with your loved one.
This too late feeling, this I’ll-never-get-this-time-back makes you chock on your own tears. While losing a loved one rips your heart apart, it also softens all of the edges by teaching you to be a little more patient, a little more kind, and a little more loving toward the things and people that need it the most.
Like a magnifying glass, through the fogginess of uncontrollable tears that run down your face without any effort, and the heart and mind guiding you to where you are meant to put you attention on, you can finally see: The metaphors are a little clearer, the melancholy is a little deeper and your senses are awake; each smells, touch and smiles are captured like if they were never experienced before, you can hear and feel the cracks, drops, heat, and cold as if it were the first time, your body shivers of dread making it all feel unsurvivable….
The world stopped and the true meaning of grief resonates like the vibrations of a Gong: It can on one hand be the most intense destructive loss and on the other, the most profound love ever felt.
Could grief be our biggest oxymoron?
On some days, while the pain subsides and the shock diminished…. I can see myself losing my wisdom in the every day loop and the pause isn’t there anymore, I catch myself behaving to what could resemble taking things for granted; I have forgotten how I got here, putting aside the magnifying glass and dismiss the drapes that opened during my biggest fall, my biggest heartache, which allowed me to grasp the value of life treasures and I don’t feel comfortable with that version of me. My grief has not led me to poor regulation through “silly” discomforts.
So, I re- center myself and use my grief to remind me of the love, the loss but above all what it showed me as clear as see-through waters: To be thankful for what stillness can really be like, push through the dark ideas of death and regret and dig deeper into the peaceful side of celebration of life itself and of my loved one.
I try to get back to that place. It doesn’t have to be painful, at times it is, and it would be foolish to not admit that the pain can be the contributor to all my strength, until I have nothing else to give in between the waves of grief, and the feeling of the ceiling crumbling emerges.
Somehow, I’ve learned that grief has a “soft” spot.
Some sort of quietness and if I could touch it, it would feel like silk…There it is, the stillness of it all…
Where if you linger in it, don’t get distracted, it will show you what life is all about. With a complete open eyed, heart and mind, grief is pure love and surrendering to it is the ultimate truth, and living through the present moments with these soft whispers can make it all much more beautiful, timeless and yet so brief.