True love is a harsh taskmaster for amongst its many riches are its demands: vulnerability, courage and altruism. To love with one’s heart, soul and being is an act of great courage and great risk. The courage to surrender to come what may and the certain likelihood that one of you will die before the other. The zenith of loving with all that one is and has is never far from the benthic depths of grief when that love no longer exists on this mortal plane. If you have known such a love, you are amongst the few and the fortunate. If you have lost such a love, you know why our ancestors keened and wailed and rent their clothes in grief. Such expressions these days are unseemly in our modern world and we no longer wear a black armband to signify our bereavement. We are expected to move on quickly so as to not make others uncomfortable. Yet in moving on quickly, we denigrate the memory of the one we loved and we spit on the abiding notion of love. To love well and deeply is not a trifle, to love well and deeply is noble and dangerous and to grieve that love, fitting. Grief is a thing that moves within its own timeline and it is never done. It appears unbidden in that early morning mist between waking and dreaming when it thunders in like a cudgel to remind you of your loss. It appears when you gasp believing if only for a moment, that you see the one you’ve lost walking down the street. It appears in the anxious anticipation of anniversaries and the sorrow of dreams unrealized. It appears in the communal shunning of widows and the paradoxical whole-hearted embracing of widowers. It is the unwelcome guest that once taken up residence, moves rooms yet never actually leaves.
It can be an arduous and repeatedly heart-breaking task to accept that a loss has happened. It is harder than it seems yet the stakes for failure are high. if we do fail in this, we condemn ourselves to a half-life of wishing and yearning or raging for that which is never more. In this denial, time seems to stop, frozen at the moment of loss, yet one’s lifespan does not. A cursory search reveals many examples of this inability to accept what’s happened amongst those we know. This task of acceptance is made more difficult if the loss is unexpected or tragic or caused by something or someone unspeakable. The shock of a sudden loss causes the world as we have known it to stop as if the world itself has ceased to turn on its axis. Being forcibly pulled from a reality of life with the beloved in it to a reality of life without the beloved in it, is an insult to the brain, mind, body, heart and soul. This new reality tastes foul and putrid, each day shows colourless and bland. What we would not give for the sparkling light of another good hour or day with the one we love. Yet we can never recapture that which is lost and that is the horrid reality we must accept if we are to live and perhaps eventually one day, even love again.
