Beautiful Grief?

[Beautiful Future - XX]

Grief never goes away. It evolves, shifts, transforms . . . but it never goes away. It’s always there; it’s always becoming something unexpected.

Sometimes grief looks like silence.
Other times it looks like tears.
Occasionally, it looks like writing. A lot.

I’m still grieving the loss of my dad to ALS. And it was five years ago (almost to the day)!

What are you grieving? What have you lost?

Grief-causing loss can look like physical death. But it can also look like the death of dreams. Friendships. A job or career. It can look like the death of an idea, or the shattering of expectations. It can even look like losing loved ones . . . to ideology, aggressive behavior, or hatefulness.

Much of my time grieving the loss of my dad looked like writing.
With tears at first.
And long stretches of silence.
But it also looked like discovery.

Something always becomes of grief. It always takes us somewhere if we follow it. Usually that somewhere is a mysterious landscape within us that, before loss, we didn’t allow ourselves to explore.

It’s paradoxical, but the future is beautiful the more we allow ourselves to grieve.

I think Dad would be proud of my “grief work".