In the beginning, grief can feel like it is everywhere, because a photograph can make you cry, a song can catch you off guard, a familiar place can trigger tears, and the most ordinary little thing can bring a memory rushing back before you have even had time to prepare yourself for it. It can feel as though everything somehow leads back to the loss because when somebody has been such an important part of your world, learning how to live in a world where they are no longer physically present takes time.
In the past few weeks I have been thinking about the term "when the grief settles". I don't mean that it disappears, because I'm not sure grief ever completely disappears when we have truly loved someone, and I don't think healing means reaching a point where they no longer matter or where we somehow become unaffected by their absence. Instead, I think grief slowly changes shape, and somewhere along the way the love and the memories begin to take up more space than the pain of the loss.
It's when you can talk about them without being on the verge of tears, knowing that the memories that once brought tears immediately begin to bring something else with them as well. You find yourself looking at a photograph and smiling before you cry, or perhaps not crying at all, and you can talk about them and remember something funny they did without the sadness and tears completely taking over the memory. The love was always there, of course, but gradually it seems to find its way back to the surface.
I think that might be what happens when grief settles, because the person or people we loved, or in my case today when I saw photo memories of my precious doggie Ella-Mae who crossed the rainbow bridge a few years ago, hasn't become any less important and the love certainly hasn't become any smaller, but the grief has gently found its place in my heart in a peaceful way. I also notice that I can now talk about my parents without crying, whereas I couldn't do that a few weeks ago. We haven't forgotten them, moved on from them or stopped missing them, because they remain woven into the fabric of who we are and into the life we have lived, but remembering them no longer has to mean only remembering that they are gone.
Of course, grief being grief, there will probably always be moments when it rises again, because an anniversary, a birthday, a familiar smell, an unexpected photograph or sometimes absolutely nothing obvious in everyday routine all can suddenly bring the tears back, and I think that is simply part of loving someone who is no longer here. Healing was never meant to be measured by how long it has been since we cried, and there is certainly no imaginary finish line where we are supposed to have completed grief and neatly packed it away.
Today, though, when I looked at Ella-Mae's photograph, my overwhelming thought wasn't that she had crossed the rainbow bridge, it was that she was loved, and what a beautiful difference there is between those two ways of remembering. She was here, she was mine, I was hers, we shared a beautiful part of our lives together, and she brought me a kind of love and joy that remains part of me even though I can no longer reach down and pat her.
Maybe healing is simply reaching a place where we can carry them forward with us, where their memory brings warmth as well as sadness, and where gratitude for having had them begins to sit alongside the longing to have them back.
Maybe that is when grief settles, not when we stop missing them and certainly not when we stop loving them because we will always love them, but when the beautiful memory of having loved them begins, little by little, to become greater than the pain of having lost them.
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