Loss is universal, omnipresent and timeless, it happens to everyone, it can suddenly stun you, like a thunderbolt, or it can be drawn out and cold, dripping on your life like winter rain, either way it wreaks havoc and causes agonising pain.
All human beings feel the grief of loss, and it is not always death that robs us of loved ones. It can be harder to bear if someone leaves you out of choice, just stops loving you, and by deserting you, crushes your dreams, destroys your future and steals your self esteem.
When someone you love dies, or walks away from you, the loss will cause a wound, and like all wounds it will need time and attention before it will heal. At first we don’t want the wound to heal, we consider it a betrayal of our feelings, so we pick at it when we are alone and lonely, embracing the pain. It is a connection with our loved one we don’t want to lose.
Grief colours the world a suffocating grey and a fog of sadness hangs over everything we do either for a little while, or for a long time. Eventually we begin to notice our surroundings, people and places become important again and the healing has begun.
Gradually things start to change, as a Chinese proverb says 'One joy shatters a hundred grief’s', and slowly and surely joy creeps in, to use a Sufi aphorism 'When the heart weeps for what it has lost, the soul laughs for what it has found'.
Losing a loved one drives us to states of extreme emotion and that can be exhausting, we need to rest up, let the wound heal and let small joys lift us slowly back into life again.
“Sob if you must parting is hell, but life goes on so sing as well” Joyce Grenfell
Title quote from Neil Diamond song