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Grief is a spiritual awakening, a realisation that in a world of mirages, life is a matter of impermanence. True grief has no speedy resolution but through the mind and identity shattering loss and the dead end feeling, we proceed to a real understanding of the world.
The humbling acceptance that nothing lasts and all happiness is fleeting, all beauty transient, all love a memory. Grief cannot be denied, it is a reflection of the deep connect with the lost, we learn to love them anew.
From a sense of disorientation and alienation from everything, comes the awakening that those who have left us may not be alive but exist —
in every memory, in every attachment we have, in our every action and inaction
Grief needs acknowledgement and tremendous courage, a self effacement to bare ones soul before others but we come to terms when we realise the commonality of grief that binds us in the universal journey towards mortality.
It teaches us compassion for the human predicament and makes us reappraise our lives, to promote love as the only standard in the midst of mutability.
Wendy McNaughton says in her book How to say Goodbye, “We are fundamental motes of matter, beholden to entropy, haunted by loss, saved only by love.”
We ponder on the big questions, we learn to regret and forgive and accept forgiveness with humility. There is no avail , incessantly raging against the light and it is absurd to desire permanence in a world forever given to flux. In the midst of despair we learn to hope, to take comfort in natural events, in the empathy of those who wipe our tears wordlessly.
We learn what it means to be human, to see the world more deeply, to seek how best to dissolve the self within something larger.
Grief for things we cannot control, grief for what cannot be understood, grief for what lies beyond us becomes a source of transformation and transcendence.
In the face of evanescence, we need to savour the joys of the world we inhabit, instead of a passive continuance of existence life needs resume its celebratory qualities with it’s beautiful ordinariness. Great grief gives great thought, art and literature that stand as imperishable monuments of love and beauty.