September 26, 2024

On Grief: From Root to Sky

Grief is a complicated monster and mirror. It is a wild thing you cannot tame and yet,  you make small progress with time, bit by bit. It’ll always have teeth. It’ll always growl and snap at you, surprising you. But with days and months and years, you become accustomed to each other. Not friends and not allies, but something less than enemies.

We grieve the dead in myriad, complicated ways. There’s no rulebook for it. There’s no set parameters or meter. Grief is always different, from loss to loss, from person to person. You know it, when you feel it. When it comes bubbling up out of the earth of who you are, roots planted firmly in your bones. If you’re lucky, you can make a garden out of it, a place you visit in your own heart. A haunting of remembrance.

Grief doesn’t only apply to the dead, though. We grieve lost opportunities. Breakups. Friends who drift away, friends who we fell out with. We mourn the living as much as the dead, but there’s no name for that. We often don’t talk about it. Grief for the dead is expected. It’s okay to say, “I miss my mother.” But not, “I miss the girl in second grade who had a crooked smile.”

That said, grief is a facet of life. It’s natural. It sucks, yes. There are days where you want to cry, scream, and/or punch things. And sometimes, you do. Grief makes it hard to think. Grief feels like a fog in your heart. You’re just sitting still, hoping for a lighthouse. Eventually, you find some kind of footing. Even if it doesn’t feel like you will.

I saw an article recently that claimed that AI could, essentially, eliminate grief. It’d cobble together some approximation of a loved one, thus solving the grief problem.

Problem. Like people and feelings are math. As is we’re an equation to be solved. My whole heart recoiled. Because as terrible and heart-rending as grief is—and it is devastating—it is a fundamental part of humanity. It is part of who we are and who we loved and how we loved. And how we love, because it doesn’t evaporate instantly with time. That love doesn’t ever really vanish into the ether. So, to pull grief out of the center of it all dismisses those real emotions, trying to undercut the very marrow of what it means to care.

We fall in love, knowing we might lose that love. We fall in love, knowing something could go wrong, that our time is finite—and our time together even more finite than that. If you look at love from an outside perspective, it seems remarkably brave to have an open heart. To risk. To risk again. To risk one more time, because what if what if what if. To bastardize Plath, that brag of your heart—it’s a true compass. A brilliant reason why.

At any moment, we could lose what we love. Who we love. We like to pretend that our days are not a race against time itself. That things are secure and steady. But they’re not. They never are. And that’s all the more reason to love each other. Ferociously and without condition. Because grief comes for us all, eventually. Time after time. And how we get through it is by leaning on and loving each other, deeply, in the wake of every stumble and ache. In the middle of hardship, love harder. Be an open door and open arms. A space of comfort and delight.

Grief is part of our story. But it is never the whole story. If it feels like that—and it sometimes does—remember: love runs deeper than everything else. Follow the roots toward the sky. Let the sun greet you. It’s there, I promise. Always.