We All Lose Things in Life We Wish We Had Again

March 26, 2022 Post a Comment

It is nearly impossible to count the people who have shared their reflections on the relationship betwixt grief and love. Only a few . . .

"Grief is the price you pay for love" -Colin Murray Parkes (later famously quoted by Queen Elizabeth 2)

"Grief and love are two sides of the same coin" -a zillion people

"Grief can only be where love lived first" – a zillion more people

"Grief is love with no identify to go" – Jamie Anderson

Even Marvel got in on information technology recently:

"But what is grief, if not dearest persevering?" -Vision, Wandavision

We've even written about it here at WYG, in our article "Grief is Love".

Listing information technology out this way, it sounds quite pithy and cliche, doesn't information technology? Information technology rings dangerously similar something meant to round out the jagged edges of grief. I can imagine the bluster of a griever, met with these sentiments from a well-intentioned friend at the wrong moment. These experience like a banal platitude, an try to quell or distract from the immense pain of loss.

Yet grievers themselves clear this same sentiment frequently – that grief is love. I take been thinking a lot lately almost how love and grief, information technology isn't just a one-for-one exchange. It isn't that the verbal same love we had for someone who was in one case living at present transforms into the grief we have for them once they're gone. They consumed a infinite in our lives, they left a gaping hole, but grief feels somehow immensely bigger and greater than only the hole. I retrieve that might be why grievers talk about the relationship between love and grief in a different way than those offer banalities.

The Presence of Absence

Absence allows the states to tap into a new depth of love, one we didn't know existed. It feels like a depth we simply couldn't access while they were notwithstanding live. It is a blazon of love predicated on the void they left in the globe. When becoming a parent for the commencement fourth dimension, so frequently people reach for words to explain that bringing a kid into the world has opened the door to a type of dear they didn't know existed. Foreign every bit it seems, I find myself believing that losing someone we honey so deeply does something similar.

We've talked before about yearning in grief. Yearning is actually i of the most mutual grief emotions, and nonetheless it is one people often struggle to label. In 2007 grief researchers Paul K. Maciejewski and Holly Prigerson placed yearning front and center, citing findings that it'southward really amoredominant feature after a decease than those emotions we well-nigh typically acquaintance with grief like anger and sadness.

And when yous retrieve about it, it makes sense. Yearning, as the Oxford Dictionary defines it is to, "have an intense feeling of longing for something, typically something that 1 has lost or been separated from". Researchers who expect at yearning are even more than specific:

"Yearning is an emotional state widely experienced in situations involving loss, focused on a desire for a person, place, or thing that was treasured in the by."
O'Connor and Sussman (2014)

The Language of Love and Loss

There are words in other languages that signal to this same sentiment and add together to information technology. They add the slice that I doubtable is crucial to understanding yearning in grief. It is a longing or yearning for something you know that you tin't (or probably can't) become back.

In German, sehnsucht : A high degree of intense (recurring), and often painful want for something, particularly if there is no promise to attain the desired, or when its attainment is uncertain, still far away.

In Portuguese, saudade: A deep emotional country of melancholic longing for a person or thing that is absent. It often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never exist had once more.

When someone dies, their absence becomes its own presence. Nosotros come up to love and hate their void. It represents all that is gone, all that we loved, all that miss. We detest the reality it represents – that they are physically missing from the world. Only we also love the reality that information technology represents – that our love for that person is so cracking that they are withal "here", even when they are no longer physically here. We grab ahold of their absence and cling information technology as tightly as nosotros can. We still visit and revisit our memories, knowing they agree both the deepest joy and the deepest pain. We marvel that the depth of our dear, our loss, and our grief. Nosotros want the grief to stop and we want it never to end, all at once.

With their absence, nosotros learn something nosotros couldn't know while they were living. We larn simply how deeply we were capable of missing them. Nosotros learn merely how much pain their void in our lives could crusade. We larn how willing we are to lean into that hurting in order to keep them close. Though nosotros can imagine what it will be like to lose someone nosotros dear, when it happens, we larn it was actually unimaginable. And in that gap between what nosotros imagined and what we never could have imagined, lies a blazon of love we meet for the first time in our grief.

The Portuguese writer Manuel de Melo divers saudad every bit "a pleasure you suffer, an ailment yous savor". Some may disagree, simply I know that there has been a pleasance in the suffering of my ain loss. There has been a wonder that my love could exist deeper than I ever knew. There is an awe in feeling feelings that I didn't know existed, emotions that can merely emerge in the vast void of loss.