It’s been a week of grief. One friend's life cracking open, and another's ending. Both give me the opportunity to show up with my whole heart. Grief is ruthlessly honest in a way ordinary daily life rarely lets us be. It allows reverence for the life that was, for the friendships that held, and for the simple, staggering fact that we loved someone enough that their loss becomes our own. It also bitch slaps us into the present moment like nothing else. The resulting empathy is one of the only things that closes the distance between people. Every genuine act of empathy requires stretching past one’s own experience into someone else’s. Both of these friends have witnessed my struggles with loss in the past. Witnessed. Not managed, not fixed, not redirected, but genuinely saw me in the specific texture of my specific pain. That experience of seeing and being seen is healing.
In my experience, grief is cumulative. This means we are never only grieving what is directly in front of us, but with the full weight of every loss that came before. Which is why a fresh grief can feel disproportionate to people on the outside looking in. They're measuring the current loss while we’re feeling the whole overwhelming, heartbreaking sum of every loss we thought would finish us. It also means our capacity for grief is not a flaw or a fragility. It's a measure of how much we have loved across a lifetime. The accumulation is proportional to the love.
When my boyfriend died in a freak accident thirty years ago, a little piece of me died with him. At the time, the friend that died this past week said to me with tears in his eyes, “I can’t imagine how you feel and I don’t know what to say.” It was the most real and honest thing anyone could have offered in those circumstances and I’ve never forgotten the vulnerability we shared in that moment. Conversely, someone else said to me, “Well, I guess you guys weren’t meant to be together.” That was the most spectacularly, breathtakingly awful thing anyone could have said in those circumstances. And I’ve never forgotten the feeling of standing there in the rawest moment of my life holding this absolutely useless offering, and maybe even feeling obligated to be gracious about it. That sentence tried to retroactively shrink the realness of my experience. It's the exact opposite of empathy because it moved away from my pain instead of toward it. It crossed no distance. It actually created distance by suggesting that what I lost wasn't really my experience to begin with.
Luckily, along with accumulated grief comes accumulated wisdom. We have the capacity to develop a kind of fluency with loss that many people spend their whole lives avoiding. Grief teaches the value of witnessing. Not by offering up solutions or silver linings, but by being someone who will hold space for all the feelings without flinching. Grief teaches us to be that person for others because we know what its absence costs.
Seeing this flowering cactus on our hike today, this scrappy little overachiever growing between two rocks, reminded me that despite how life’s circumstances appear, the depth of who we are is always greater than the weight of what we carry. The very things that feel like they are diminishing us are actually the things that help us grow.
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