Love to Grief to Love Again

I am part of many online groups. I don't spend a lot of time in any particular one outside of the groups I manage. But they all come across my feed every so often. One in particular has me feeling a bit aghast. Much of the world does to me anymore because when you live in the gray of things, there is an exhaustion that comes from being able to see different sides clearly. It also makes explaining yourself to people who only see in black-and-white thinking rather tedious at times. But this particular post was a woman telling other women that they are no longer allowed to label their emotions as grief. They also stated that there would be no room for discussion on the matter in a public setting.

The duality of emotions is something I have long studied. I was told growing up that you couldn't feel more than one thing at a time, and I was simply crazy otherwise. I often hear this parroted by certain generations. There is a certain level of emotional maturity that is required to process and understand a multitude of emotions at one time without it being considered a "meltdown." Those I am aptly familiar with as well, and have had many. Adult, diagnosed me, understands clearly that every panic attack I had as a teenager (and likely as a child) was a result of autistic burnout and sensory overload rather than a panic attack. And trauma...

There is something about other people being told how they are allowed to label their emotions that infuriates me. Maybe it is a lingering trauma response from my upbringing; maybe it is the absolutely insane amount of understanding I have surrounding emotions. Maybe it is because we genuinely do not have the right to label grown adults' emotions without asking them first if they need help understanding what they are feeling. Maybe it's because, in this particular case, discussion in public was simply "not allowed." So you are now telling adults how to feel while also stating that they don't get a say in it.

Interesting...

So let's talk about what grief is for a moment. Because it is one hell of an emotion and can drag you under quicker than anything else. And it oftentimes embodies a multitude of emotions because grief doesn't just cover the death of a person or pet. Grief is found in letting lose of things. It is found in the creation of a new self. It is embodied in the walking away from a relationship that should have been your very safety. It is found in changes of great magnitude. Death is the completion of a cycle so that a new one begins. That is why the Death card in Tarot is my favorite.

But I often think that the beauty I find in death frightens people. They don't understand how I can find it so engaging or interact with it in such an impassioned way. And it's because I'm not usually interacting with death itself, although sometimes that is part of the walk for me. I am interacting with the cyclical nature that exists within the time-space continuum. We feel the magnitude of grief with any ending. It is in the feeling that these final threads are left to blow into the wind and find a new way of being. But the feeling is often left to the wayside for fear of drowning in it, when the drowning is the very thing that is needed.

I wish I had understood that when my best friend in high school left this world. His death to this day is the most impactful experience I have had with grief in the physical form. He ended his life in the parking lot of my high school. I knew before it was ever announced. I could feel it in my bones. The way they quacked with a knowing that I did not understand yet, and the buckling of those bones when it was confirmed he was gone...Had I drowned myself in the grief, raged in the ways I needed to rage, instead of suppressing it all, the pain would have left me far sooner.

I know this because I allowed myself to feel the gut-wrenching sobs when my grandfather died. I called in a storm that day. I watched the winds whip through the trees in conjunction with my grief. But in the grief were also all the years of pain that I never allowed myself to process from years gone by. It was the plummeting of emotions that existed hidden just below the surface that I never allowed myself to feel after going no contact with my family. It was the elation for my grandmother of finally being free from the man who tortured her so relentlessly. I was the only person that man was ever nice to, aside from my husband and children. Inside these tears were grief for his passing, the wounds of bygone years, tears for the life my grandmother never got to live. Hope that she would finally be free and love the life she had left.

I allowed myself to feel all of it as it came. The wind my constant comfort. And then the rain came. I sat and let it wash away everything. I spent time in the arms of a woman I loved deeply, and then later in my husband's. The grief did not stop fully in one day. Grief this deep never does. That is not what it is meant to do. Because grief can often be measured based on the degree of love that was present. Without love, there is no grief. When we have no love for someone or something, we do not grieve the end of it. We may celebrate it if we despised them. We may relish it if it is the ending of a very difficult cycle.

But love is always the precursor to grief. In any form it may come in.

The beauty of grief is that once it has passed, the love still remains. We have simply learned how to live a life that is different. The woman who held me after my grandfather died stopped speaking to me not long after. I still to this day hold her dear in my heart and think of her often. My first love, friendships that have been lost, old versions of myself...These all had to be grieved, but in the unwinding of the tangled web of emotions that dwells within it, the love always returns and stays forever. Without the grief, the love never gets to return.

Anger becomes the form it chooses to take. And we get to be angry. There is no doubt. Many endings require righteous anger. Productive anger. Justified anger. There is beauty in anger. But what is anger really? It is simply the thing we cling to when we wish something to be different. When we know it should be different. That is why anger is beautiful. It is a guiding post to the things we want and can lead us straight back to grief.

Grief is quite literally the process of evolution from one state of being to the next. As my dear friend Aeris Noctarion teaches, the closing of a cycle is a threshold which we choose to walk through or not. Grief is the portal of that threshold.

And no one has the right to tell someone how that journey should look. Or what label to use regarding their own experience unless they have been specifically asked by the person walking the path to help them in a discovery process. It is high time we stop trying to tell people how their transformation should look.

With love,