Good Grief

 

Good grief. I've often wondered where that phrase originated. Has anyone who has ever experienced grief looked back and thought of its goodness?  Grief stalks us unknowingly throughout our lives until one day it encompasses us, taking possession of our hearts, distracting us from everything that is joy filled or grants us contentment. 

Once we belong to grief, it never seems to fully release us. It may lessen its hold upon us, even significantly, and it may become less acute, but too often grief has a chronic element too.

Grief is fostered and flourishes through loss, heartbreak, loneliness and disappointment. It feasts upon the weight of broken dreams. It knows no boundaries and it leaves no human untouched. It is marked by longing for what was, what could be, what has been, what might have been, and/or what never was.

Grief has many faces; it can be all-encompassing, overwhelming every joy-filled chamber of our lives and leaving nothing discolored (acute grief). We surprise ourselves and survive this kind of grief. It can also be the subtle knocking that chips away at our hearts, that simply changes everything subtly and perhaps indistinctly (long grief).

I have seen that grief can destroy us. It can replace our determination with hopelessness, it can blind us to our purpose, it can displace our dreams with nightmares, it can mangle what was beautiful so that we are unable to see it. It can also build into us strength and resilience and compassion. It can soften the heart while it simultaneously breaks it. 

And love. Love is interwoven deeply with grief. Love is the antidote to grief. Love is also most often the catalyst of grief. It is the hope to the hopelessness, it is the balm to loneliness. It is the compounding agent to the sorrow. And it is the restoration when coupled with time. 

I believe grief is the result of a broken world. I see it everywhere in faces I know well and in faces I do not know. When I see it, I long to fill the void, lessen the pain, replace the hurt with healing, restore once again what is broken. But, that is a Divine task. In and through Divine love we can be surprised by joy and heal in the process of the finding. I'm not sure if we're ever made whole again or if we become a different form of ourselves. 

[These are merely my musings on the subject. No cause for alarm]