I.44 — Grief

Someone is gone, and love did not stop when they did. That mismatch, the love still fully present, the person no longer here to receive it, is most of what grief actually is. There is nowhere left for it to land, so it circles, and the circling is what hurts.

Nothing here will tell you where they went, because nothing here knows. There is no promise of an elsewhere, no claim that they are still watching, still near, still somehow reachable if the right words are found. Anything offered along those lines could not be checked, and this practice does not deal in what cannot be checked, not even here, not even for this.

What can be said is smaller. The grip in grief is not on the person. It is on the having-been, on the fact that time will keep moving and putting distance between now and the last ordinary morning with them. Loosening that grip does not mean loving them less, or moving on, or being finished. It is not a task with an end.

Carried with an open hand, grief does not get lighter. It stays exactly as heavy as the loss is. What changes is whether it is a thing that can be lived beside, day by day, or a fist re-closed on the wound each morning, adding a second injury to the first. Only that much is offered. Try holding the grief instead of holding it closed, once, when it comes.