“Grief, I have learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
– Jamie Anderson
“What is grief if not love persevering?”
– WandaVision, Episode 8
“And when I turned to face grief, I saw it was just love in a heavy coat.”
“I sit with my grief. I mother it. I hold its small, hot hand. I don’t say, shhh. I don’t say, it is okay. I wait until it is done having feelings. Then we stand and we go wash the dishes. We crack open bedroom doors, step over the creaks, and kiss the children. We are sore from this grief, like we’ve returned from a run, like we are training for a marathon. I’m with you all the way, says my grief, whispering, and then we splash our face with water and stretch, one big shadow and one small.”
“When we lose certain people, or when we are dispossessed from a place, or a community, we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of prior order will be achieved. But maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us. It is not as if an “I” exists independently over here and then simply loses a “you” over there, especially if the attachment to “you” is part of what composes who “I” am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who “am” I, without you?”
Alfred Tennyson wrote the line, “'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
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A note on grief & love
Two of Us, Louis Tomlinson// Alfred Tennyson// Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis// Andrew Garfield, The Late Show with Steven Colbert// The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)// WandaVision episode 8// Leo Tolstoy//
