Grief isn’t a hole in your heart. A hole can be filled; with sand, or dirt, or cement, or plaster, or wine, or pasta, or sleep, or running endless miles, or tears. The hole that grief leaves can’t be filled with any of those things. Grief has its own bottomless ravenous shape.
And grief has its own rules relentless in their unpredictability. Sometimes it comes on fast like a rush of heat, sometimes it comes on quietly like a whisper from a shadow. It is deafening in its silence and it is numbing in its noise. Sometimes it leaves you long enough to catch your breath and sometimes it lingers so long it takes your breath away.
Grief takes so much from us while leaving so many things behind: Dashed hopes. Dead dreams. Vanished visions for the future. Grief weighs so heavily while being impossible to hold. But it’s even harder to put down, because we can’t quite get a grip on it. Grief is slippery and evasive and it oozes into places we can’t quite reach.
Grief hides where forgiveness, and forgetting, and grace, and gratitude cannot find it.
I am just like you. I’ve loved. I’ve lived. I’ve lost. But while our experiences of grief may be similar, your grief has a shape that only you know: the lips of a loved one, the hand of a child, the pawprint of a pet, the hope you once held in your heart, the rail of regret, the memory of a moment, the depths of despair, the gutting of guilt.
I’ve grieved many things in my life. With two failed marriages, grief feels more like a state of nature than a “this too shall pass” event. Maybe the secret is to let grief in and allow it to occupy its space in whatever shape it holds. Let it settle. Maybe, over time, its edges will soften and its load will lessen. Maybe it will require less energy and drain less of our attention. Maybe we come to cope with it, coexist with it, as its shape molds and eases into us. Maybe it changes us forever. Maybe it has to be that way.