Dear Quarter Lives

Dear quarter lives, 

We all have an emotion that is our personal Everest. We all have an emotion that we believe if we allow our selves to feel, we might die, but we might also reach the highest peak in our lives. We might gain a view of the world that only a handful of people have experienced. For me, that emotion is grief. Grief is my Everest. It is the one emotion that I’ve prevented myself from going through because the little glimpses I’ve gotten of it felt unbearable. It felt like I couldn’t breathe, that my heart was physically in pain. I could never allow myself to connect to grief for too long. It always overwhelmed me. But now I have come to a point in my healing journey where I must feel my grief. I must allow myself to grieve a loss I thought I wouldn’t survive. But the thing is I am still here. And I have survived despite my own disbelief in myself. Now, as I sit with my grief, I hear it asking me to trust it. To trust that I will survive feeling it. To trust too that I will not be empty without it, merely much lighter. Even though grief has been this thing I’ve always dreaded feeling, I’ve somehow developed this attachment to it. I began to confuse it with myself. The boundaries between us became blurry. But I realise now that I am not my grief. I realise too that I will not be alone without my grief. To release it from me and me from it, one thing must happen. I must cry. Have you ever had the feeling that you might lose yourself in your tears. I am afraid that if I start, I cannot stop. But I must, for the sake of my health, both mental and physical. I must free myself from my own grip on grief. 

Yes, it is often we that hold our grief captive and not the other way around. It’s like if you let go of the grief, there will no longer be proof for the loss you’ve gone through. And grief is not easy to release, the longer it stays within us, the longer it mingles and marries with other emotions. Grief for me is hugely tied to my Anger. I actually don’t know which came first. I don’t know if I was so angry that grief needed to come in to cool me down. Or if I was actually so cold in my grief, that anger came in to heat things up. The thing is our bodies are always striving for balance. Our bodies don’t recognise that we might be going through a lot of one emotion so it’ll hold back with another. Our bodies are designed to maintain balance. Neither side of the imbalance is good or bad. Neither side is wrong. It is merely the imbalance that is wrong. And I believe that’s what grief is trying to tell us, that it is merely here to even things out. It is not here to punish us or make us suffer for something bad we’ve done. It is here to tell us in fact the complete opposite, that we are not bad, that we don’t deserve to be out of balance, that we don’t deserve to suffer. It is not the grief that is causing us to suffer, it is the state of imbalance we experience after a loss. When we lose something, grief comes into that space to help us heal. Grief is healing. Grief is a gift of kindness from God to help us through our loss. Without grief, we cannot cry for the pain we are feeling, and if we cannot cry, we will continue to suffer in silence with no one in sight to help us because no one can hear us. Grief gives us our voice back. Grief helps call our loved ones to our rescue. Grief is a cry for love. Grief helps to bring us back to the present, because loss will often leave us stranded in the past. Grief is God’s way of telling us I got you. It is Their way of saying You think you might die, but I got you. I promise I do. Grief teaches us to have mercy on ourselves and on others. Grief is Mercy. And Mercy is the most godly of all acts. To learn to have mercy is to learn the language of God. I believe grief brings us closer to our Source. Grief is Spirit flowing through us. Grief is what opens our hearts again when they have been closed shut. So let it flow, dear quarter lives. Let grief flow through your veins until you are fully back here in the now with a heart open and ready to love once again. 

My grief won’t be like your grief. So to release grief, we must try to understand our own grief. We must understand what it is here to teach us. We must learn to love it. We must say thank you to it for all it has endured as we held it hostage within us. To release grief, we must be kind to ourselves. We must refrain from blaming ourselves for holding in grief. We must understand that this is what we had to do to survive, to cope with a destabilizing experience of loss. We must love ourselves through it. Hold your own hand through the grieving process. Hold your hand like you would a friend’s. Hold yourself as you birth grief out of you. And I promise you, dear one, that you will survive. Even better, you will finally come back to life. 

Please if you know someone who has recently been through a significant loss, ask about them. Even a simple text message saying I love you makes all the difference. And remember, we can experience loss in many ways beyond death. Losing a relationship, a  job, a dream, our health, our home. Grief can be very potent, but it can be very liberating as well. So feel it, free it, and if you can, help a loved one feel supported through their grieving process. Remember, we all grieve in different ways so be mindful of what you say to someone who is grieving. May our hearts be free of grief, may our souls feel held by love once again.

With love and always for peace, 

S.A.