Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief

We may discern that the easy path isn’t always the right path. And everyone and everything can become our teacher. Children and strangers teach us. Animals teach us. When we are truly awake, even an ordinary moment teaches us something. Grieving itself is a learning process.

An emotion-focused journal

assert that being happy does not mean we do not feel pain or grief or sadness — successively or, often, simultaneously. Sorrow and contentment, grief and beauty, longing and surrender coexist in the realm of sameness.

When grief asks to be seen, she meets it and embraces it as she would a visit from an old friend.

We can simply — or complicatedly — let it be.

Grief calls for us to give ourselves back to it. To remember. To reclaim. To re-grieve. And for all those things, even when they sting, I am thankful.

I’d learned how to be a student, a beginner, how to set aside my own beliefs to help others. I’d learned about patience and the power of silence.

The more we practice staying with the emotions that we think may overcome us, the more we trust our ability to fully inhabit grief.

We have earned this grief, paying for it with love and steadfast devotion.