What Is Grief?!

Grief is… the price you pay for love…

~ Earl Grollman

Grief is both a mystery to me and an old and well-loved friend. Grief knows me, my ways, how I slip out back doors and hide under the stairway. Grief respects me and I long ago came to have deep respect for Grief.

Emotional Turbulence: Understanding and Navigating Challenging Emotions. This is the title of Module 41 of A Year With Myself. My printed-out copy sits BEside me in a faded purple-ish hue where the grayscale was too worn out to work. It looks weary. And I am weary of it, though it is wise and thought-provoking.

Grief is like that. Worn out AND wise. Mysterious and familiar. And yet the words of Grollman stopped me. Granted I picked and sorted, but that is how I understand. And it is how I navigate. Especially when my emotions are in some turbulence.

Simple. Keeping things simple. This is my intention. Grief doesn’t play simple too well. Grief is more layered and juicy and its ingredients myriad. Still…

The price you pay for love… REALLY?! I think so. Well, this is what my experiences have shown.

I know Life was designed to have time alive and then death. But the price you pay for LOVE?! WOW!!!

I have to say that the one common denominator in all Grief’s guises is that there has been a loss of love. Some losses feel BIGGER where there was MORE love. Some seem more manageable where there was mayBE NOT so much…

The most important thing, though, Grief is a verb. It is a part of living human, BEing human. It is active, has legs to run on and a brain to accommodate.

Even if I completely accept that Grief is part of living AND loving, I don’t find it anymore [or less] enormous and confounding.

It is a little like most things that I DO without thinking, this grieving. Like breathing, I can’t turn it off or regulate it all that much.

Yet like writing, I can focus on it in a certain way [or NOT] and this shifts the experiencing of it.

I can hardly BEgin to enclose my thoughtsandfeelings about Grief, yet I have a sense of more having been revealed and understood.

I think understanding it as the price for love will likely stick with me though...

And that is enough.