On grief as gift
date. 2023 september 8
place. Oxford
on grief as the gift of, from and to love
Grief, I would later learn, is never the same. It has many faces, just like the sky. Every grief is different because the loss that precedes it is a different loss every time. Like how the sky looks different everyday because the clouds come and go and no single cloud there today was ever here yesterday. The sky mourns the loss of every cloud. The look of the sky is the look of grief, ever changing, never constant, because the losses are never the same.
I think back at all the losses I’ve suffered so far, which, to my relief, is not many. And at this thought, at the cusp of my relief, I peer into the future and anticipated all the losses I will suffer, to my horror, which surely, it suddenly dawned on me, will be many.
This thought bothered and disturbed me. I must, for my own relief and peace, find a way to reengineer these inevitable losses as something remotely bearable. So i toyed with the idea that perhaps every loss is a gift. The bigger the loss the loftier the gift. It surely won’t be the sort of gift that is easy to receive. It surely will be the sort of gift that one has to receive on one’s knees, broken by its weight. But a gift nonetheless.
Grief, loss, is a special sort of gift. It is the sort of gift that makes you realise all the gifts you had been given before. In showing you the hollow gap that is left when a person leaves, it makes you realise just how much space they had taken up, how much they had filled you up. In taking away all the gift they had gifted you, it, in an unbearable way that leaves you begging, shows you just how much you had. Grief and loss is, in a very odd way, the last gift of them all, the last gift they, whom we now mourn, give us.
This is the sort of gift that hollows you. Perhaps counterintuitively, the only way to receive this hollowing gift well is to hollow yourself further. It is to give away the very last parts of them that you harbour within you. To give it away is far from giving it up. In fact, it is the only way to hold onto them, the very last of them.
What are those very last parts of them that you must give away? Your memories of them and all the beautiful things that they have left you with—all the jokes, all the smiles, all the love and words of encouragement that had pulled you from the edges, all the warm dishes that salvaged your horrid days. Give them all away to other people. In giving them away, you are in fact keeping them alive. In seeing that the jokes they have once told you and made you laugh are now making others laugh, your beloved moves among them too. They become apart of the people who is now laughing at their jokes. In the laughter, you will hear them laugh too. In telling the jokes, you will have a taste of their joy when they made you laugh. In that joy hides a certainty that they are not gone, not yet at least, not if you keep loving the world on their behalf.