People keep telling me that grief gets easier. I am not sure that is the right word for what happens.
It does not get easier. It gets more familiar. You learn to carry it differently — the way you learn to carry anything heavy over a long distance. You find the position that hurts least. You take breaks. You stop expecting it to be gone by morning.
I have sat with a lot of people in grief. What I have noticed is that the ones who do best are not the ones who move through it fastest. They are the ones who stop pretending it is not there. Who say its name out loud. Who let it sit at the table instead of trying to keep it out of the house.
Grief is not the opposite of love. It is what love looks like when the person is gone. Which means the size of your grief is also the size of what you had. That is not nothing. That is everything.
“Grief is not the opposite of love. It is what love looks like when the person is gone.”
A question for you
What are you carrying right now that you have not yet given a name?
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