In grief, you become bigger 😞

When you lose someone you love it can feel like endless suffering. Well-meaning friends and family might tell you “it’ll get better” or even “go away”. My experience is that this is often misleading, but like all perspectives, it’s pointing to partial truth.

It seems to me that the immense pain of loss never goes away. It seems to me it doesn’t always lessen with time. What happens is that the identity of the griever grows. You may subjectively feel like the pain gets smaller, the same way you go back to your elementary school classroom and marvel at how tiny the desks seem. But in fact, you got bigger; more capable of including your loss as part of who you are. More capable of feeling that every ounce of grief is saturated in love. When we expand to take our losses with us, we honor that love. This is not consolation for any of you in mourning. All I know about consolation is to sit with someone in the raw honesty of feeling and be with it all.

With love, Jordan