Member-only story
The Magic of Grief
Why is grief so goddamn transformational!?
Grief profoundly changes people. But why?
What is it about this emotion that completely unravels people? halts lives? cements newness inside forever and journeys alongside us for life?
I can now say I’ve had the strange, awful pleasure of meeting grief. It was a cool summer evening. My ex-husband and I holding each other, weeping, saying a final goodbye. As we looked deep into each other’s eyes and thanked each other for the last four years, as hard as they were, something ravaged my body unlike anything I’ve ever known. A force that felt like a portal in my chest opening, sucking all of me into it without my consent.
The feeling was like being totally broken open by something outside myself. Broken open and then crushed. Something that torpedoed my body into itself with no option but to surrender.
As humans we find ways to numb our anger and suppress our rage; cope with our sadness or loneliness in ways that still make life liveable. But grief is the one emotion that you can’t quite escape. Grief seems to take all those feelings and package them up into this one, super-powered hyper-somatic that takes you out with one blow and you are literally never the same again.
