Living Grief

Photo by Jared Rice on Unsplash

The title itself is an oxymoron. How can grief be living? Isn’t grief the absense of something? Something you had which you no longer do. A death of sorts. To grieve is to in essence honor loss. Some say grief is just love with no where to go.

So what is living grief? Francis Weller is a grief master of sorts. He speaks to the sacredness of tending to our grief. As though it is a living breathing thing. In need of our attention. Like anything we neglect, grief too will come kicking and screaming begging like the inner child part of you you’ve chosen to ignore for far too long. And usually at the most inopportune time.

Living grief is living with the grief of something or someone that is currently living. Thats how I’ll choose to define it in this narrative i’m creating.

I think dropping the need to compare grief stories is the same as trauma stories. It doesn’t serve us to discern if it is more painful, worse, etc, to grieve a living person place or thing, version of ourself, that we are capable of re-engaging with or vs if the person place opportunity etc, has left for good.

But there is an element of choice at play here.

To grieve a relationship where the person is still alive is to assume that there was a choice made. That to have this person in your life would cause more pain than it would joy. And to make that choice while simultaneously loving that person can ensue some sort of temporary hell. Suffering. Sadness. Loss. It is to come to the conclusion that we are better off protecting ourselves from said person than risking trusting them. It is a decision I feel all of us make at some point in our life.

This is living with living grief.

This is when we choose to prioritize the peace of our future self, her happiness, her safety and protection over a connection with someone from our past, be it a family member, lover, or friend. Once we do a certain amount of awakening our consciousness we can’t unsee the things we have seen. We can’t unknow what people are capable of. We can forgive, but we can’t forget.

These are the type of circumstances that can lend themselves to living with living grief.

I don’t feel its talked about enough. That you can be enlightened and loving and kind and choose to…