Grief, love and community

Mended Heart by d.goth

Note: for the purposes of this post, I am going to be talking about grief over death of a loved one, but there are many types of grief for many different experiences of loss. I think the principles I write of are the same, but it's simpler for the post to just refer to grief over death.

Three weeks ago, a dear young trans man died. He was just 20 years old and had wiggled his way deep into my heart. He was full of love, silliness and more than his fair share of struggle. He reminded me of my trans kid and of a younger version of me, trying to find his way in the world. He didn't find his way in this world, instead he is finding his way in the next, wherever that may be. So, I’ve been grieving. And thinking a lot about grief.

When people die, lots of people have sayings that comfort them. One of them, that I had never heard before the last couple of weeks (despite being deep into grief theory and ritual for over a decade) is "grief is love with nowhere to go".

Some people take comfort in this, and if you do, I encourage you to continue finding that comfort as I would never want to take that away from anyone. (And if you do, you may not want to keep reading because this post explores my discomfort with this saying.)

Ever since hearing this, I have felt super challenged by this idea.

Grief, to me, is just love. Grief and love are two sides of the same coin. Grief is all the love that we felt while someone was present, and now they are gone we can’t offer it to their physical form, even though our hearts yearns to be able to. But that doesn't mean that the love has nowhere to go.

To me, saying that our love has nowhere to go denies the importance of the grieving process. It says that loving our dead, through grief, is meaningless, or at least unimportant. It dissociates our love from our grief, instead of seeing them as different expressions of the same thing. And to me, that brings no comfort.

In many cultures all around the world, people believe that grief is necessary to see a person on to the next journey (whatever that may be). Grief is the love that sends a spirit on to whatever comes next, and that grieving our beloved dead is a critical process of ensuring our love for them is fully expressed.

Grief is a testament of love that we send to the person who has died. It is the boat that carries their spirit onward in the river of life. It is critical and necessary for our dead to feel our love, in the form of grief, to make their way onwards.

Many cultures believe (and I tend to agree) that without adequate grieving spirits are unable to cross onwards and, instead, stay in this realm, as hungry ghosts. These hungry ghosts disrupt the lives of the living and attempt to find the expressions of love (aka grief) that were denied them in death. And the living stay stuck with their unexpressed love (grief).

For me, the image of a spirit flowing forward on a stream of love (that is our grief), carried into the next journey, is one of beauty and hope, even if our grief looks messy and wild, and feels oh so hard to express.

By saying our love has nowhere to go, we get stuck. We grasp for something to fill the void, but that is so much harder because grief, unexpressed, prevents new connections from forming. Unexpressed grief can lead to apathy, hopelessness, helplessness and despair. Unexpressed grief forces the love we have for someone who is gone to go nowhere, instead of going towards our beloved dead, and nourish their spirit, wherever it may be on its next journey. Unexpressed grief can prevent new loves from forming, can prevent deeper wells of joy from being accessed, can prevent energy that could be put into building deeper community and love from manifesting.

And it is understandable that we aren't skilled in expressing grief. That we feel our love now has nowhere to go.

In Western cultures, we have mostly lost the ability to truly grieve. Instead we intellectualize our grief, through journalling, talk therapy, or other forms of intellectual pursuit (not to say these don’t have value, but used exclusively, they dissociate the bodily experience of grief). We cry quietly at funerals or have celebrations of life where we try to hold happy tears. We don't make space for the wild and uncontrollable grief that our love has transformed into. We don't, for the most part, know how to hold the screaming, crying, flailing pain that is the bodily experience of grief.

Our bodies are wise. They innately know how to move grief, how to express our love for our beloved dead. But we have been so suppressed that it is hard. It feels too vulnerable and unsafe. And, because of our individualistic culture, we think we have to go through these scary expressions alone, and so we repress them.

But grief was never meant to be experienced alone. Grief is meant to be held in community. It is why we have funerals. It is why we have so many rituals around death. It is why we come together, instinctively, after a death. We hold each other closer. And, even if we are unskilled with actually grieving, we still instinctively feel the need to do so.

We must allow our love - our grief - to be expressed, well held, in community, with all its messy wildness. We need to allow the heaving sobs and the desperate screams and the snotty, blubbering messiness.

And as we move through our grief, we can hold each other closer. We can build new, and stronger, love with the living, and allow the love we have for our beloved dead to carry them onwards.

Through our grief, we make space for more love. We make space for new love to come in. In our grief, love does have somewhere to go -- to our beloved dead and to one another.

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With care

Amelia