All I Know of Grief and Love
The heart circles back. It always does. Sometimes, slowly and sometimes not. But it does not stay rooted to one place, not really.
Put like that, you could imagine heart like an anchor. Or, depending, an albatross. Surely, a heavy thing. But the truth is, the heart is only weighed down temporarily. It is only a burden in an instant, or what may feel like an instant in retrospect.
Grief feels like a stone you swallow, something that grows vines and grows in odd directions. But love is the same, too—encompassing and gnarled, though in a way that’s beautiful. Or sometimes tragic. Or sometimes messy. Love is layered and somewhat incomprehensible—try to talk about it and it feels like bits of a dream tangling and untangling. You can shine light on parts of it, drag meaning out of it, but you’ll never be able to speak on it entirely. That, of course, never keeps us from trying.
Love isn’t always a pure thing. Not in the way of Hallmark cards and Sunday dinners. Sometimes, we love people who hurt us, who cannot fit into our lives in easy ways. Like a puzzle to a picture you aren’t making, love doesn’t always make sense. And that is the beauty of it, often enough. Because if you blunder through life making sense, life isn’t really all the interesting, is it? Sometimes, the heart yells plot twist, and that’s an adventure knocking at your door.
The same can be said for grief. It arrives unbidden, sometimes erratically. You cannot predict its pattern any more than you can that of love. You cannot brace for it. Guard against it. There are no charms, spells, or rituals to ward yourself from it. You can fight it, and everyone has in their lives.
But like love, grief gets its way. Like love, grief knows itself, even if you do not want to name it. Even if you cannot for myriad reasons name it. Things don’t always need to be named to be true.
Lately, I have been trying to decide if I’m brave enough for several things. And what that bravery might look like. And what best honors my own heart. I don’t think there’s an easy answer. I don’t think there ever is an easy answer. But I’ve been thinking about my mom and how I sometimes mourned her by making poor decisions. And how, with enough distance, I can see more easily the other choices I might’ve made.
But that’s the thing about grief and love—you end up caught in the thrall of it, the storm of it. You don’t always get clear enough to be smart or wise. And I think it’s important to allow for that. The missteps and the miracles. The longing and the letdowns. The complicated tapestry of our hearts—imperfect and so very vulnerable at times.
It’s so easy to hold ourselves to some impossible standard that is very divorced from actual life. Partly as some kind of strange punishment and partly because we are often driven to be one thing or another.
But the final truth is this: you never have to be anything other than who you are. Anyone other than who you are. And when you stand amid the crosswords, wondering, pondering, trying to figure things out—remember that you don’t have to sort out the universe all that fast.
The heart moves at its own pace. And that is more than good enough.