This past Sunday my co-host and I did an episode of our show Swalif, after having been away for a couple of months. We missed conversing with the Instagram community and we love having conversations that are intimate and intelligent about stuff that matters to people.
We discussed how the last year has brought about immense emotional suffering for so many of us for different reasons and how sadly some of us lost people we love. We all encounter grief in different ways. For some it’s the loss of a loved one, for some it’s the loss of a job or a relationship.
I myself had three very painful losses in the last year, reflecting on grief, I asked myself is it a process? Is it a feeling? The definition I came to was that grief is simply love that has no place to go.
In his book A Grief Observed, CS Lewis writes “No one ever told me grief felt so much like fear.” On our show we had a guest who recently lost her father. I asked her if she could identify with that feeling. Fear of what? Fear of forgetting that person, fear of loneliness, fear of growing old alone, fear of losing yourself, fear of the pain will never stop, that his life won’t matter anymore.
Anyone who had lost someone they love, knows that you can’t just ‘move on’. You have to find a way to move through and move with the loss. There is life before them and life after them and they are both so different.
I think the way to deal with that type of pain is grabbing those who you have left, loving them, holding them, not taking them for granted. Sending them that extra note, the extra text, the extra hug or the extra kind thing.
It’s the shortness of life that makes it special. If we live forever and if life never ended it would not be special. It is death that makes life special and understanding that give us perspective so we stop wasting things like time, loving people and not telling them, not resolving conflicts, unforgiveness, these are all enemies, like a cancer that eats up the precious rare commodity of time.
Knowing something and living something are two different things, when you lose someone you love, you start to live in a different way, you take on a new appreciation for every single moment for the gift that it is.
• The author is a consultant and coach. Instagram handle: @miss_shefa, Website: missshefa.com