Grief is an experience we have all been with. We have all loved and lost someone dear along the way. Some of us have looked at grief in the eye and some of us have floundered. There is no roadmap for grief. It is for Time to usher us through life with its powers of healing and reconciliation. Slowly as we go through the initial consternation, then denial and indignation and the coming to terms with the inevitable, we realise it is a long journey we take with all humanity.
All of us are given a trajectory of life we need to run through and when our lease of life runs out we need to leave without a second thought. Our cells have an expiry date, it is written in our chromosomes. Nothing can be certain than the end at the appointed hour and yet nothing prepares us for the exit. In the face of all transience, in a universe always in constant change, we cannot think of a life of permanence.
The Buddha says however much we desire to predict outcomes, learning to accept the inherent uncertainty of human existence could be what finally liberates us. When someone dear departs from our lives we are confronted with a large meaninglessness of everything around us and we end up questioning the meaning of existence.
The ephemerality of life strikes us, our inability to process loss makes us helpless. Our feeling of devastation is summed up beautifully by poet W.H. Auden: “The stars are not wanted now; put out everyone; Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun. Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. For nothing now can come to any good”. Grief cannot be endured alone, it needs to be acknowledged and treated. It is from this premise we turn to retrace our steps towards normalcy and the business of life. We live through memories of those we have loved, each little thing is a reminder of their presence, their voice in our hearts and heads, and everything they did or did’nt do. Love goes beyond the physical person and the presence of the person ceases to be of importance. Grief is part of living and loving. Loss leaves in its place an experience so private and yet universal. Bertrand Russell says in his essay The Conquest of Happiness: “All our affections are at the mercy of death, which may strike down those whom we love at any moment.”
Reading through difficult times is a way to understand these times and persevere through them. Joan Didion in her classic memoir of grief The Year of Magical Thinking goes through the strange roller-coaster of grief, does get a grip on reality and finds that life needs to be lived at all cost. While hosting a Christmas party in the wake of her loss she says, “I was doing it for myself, a pledge that I would not lead the rest of my life as a special case, a guest, someone who could not function on her own.”
From great suffering, great beauty arises. This gives us the courage to accept our grief with the realisation that life is not diminished but enhanced by its fragility and impermanence.
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