I am thinking about grief. And love. Love and grief. They are intrinsically connected. We cannot have one without the other. Love, the singular reason to exist, is like jumping off a cliff, trusting that, until ground is hit, we will experience flying.
We get lost in it. We commit our lives to it, we’ve fought duals over it, we fight wars over it, we search the world for it. If not for love, then what?
When love is lost, it’s as if we’ve hit ground. The dark night. Feelings of hopelessness, of isolation. A malady of spirit.
Dr. Candace Pert spent twenty years at the National Institutes of Health proving that emotions are not in our brains. They are in our bodies. In every cell of our being.
So yes, a broken heart. The brokenness of grief is a physical thing.
And if, once landed, we survive that shattered place, we move on to the grief – like shuffling through the sawdust and glitter after the circus leaves town.
But grief – as painful as it is – gets a very bad rap, and it’s easy to see why. It colors everything, it becomes the lens through which we view it all. But let’s think about that. The love-driven grief has changed our perspective, twisted our reality, and turned all we know on its head. It cracks open our senses and forces us – if we’re willing – to take inventory of the feelings. To add and rearrange what we now know of life to the bookshelves in our mind.
Philosophers have written tomes about it, songwriters have written songs, artists and sculptors have dedicated their works to expressing it. In 1898, and upon his children’s insistence, William Westmore Story sculpted “Angel of grief” or “Weeping Angel” for the grave of his beloved wife Emelyn. It became his last sculpture. [image above]
In the end it is our grief, after all, that reflects the extent to which we have loved.
