Grief is love with everywhere to go

"Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go." ~ Jamie Anderson

Fifteen years ago to the day, my seven-year-old niece died. She was run over by a speeding, drunken driver while on her way to the store with the domestic worker, one block away from her home. 

The holidays were never quite the same after that. The Christmas tree and decorations were taken down in haste; a funeral was planned instead of a Christmas lunch. That holiday season was sad and continued to be for years after. There was nothing but sadness where joy used to be. It was so much more than being shrouded by a dark cloud. It was like the light had been completely extinguished.

We met each year after that, lit candles, cried, and remembered. Eventually, the ache started to feel normal, so much so that the decorations went up again, family got together again, and we poured all our grief into surviving.

Death came knocking on my own doorstep eight years ago. That first Christmas, five months after Zia died, is still a blur. It was odd trying to balance being a mother to my four-year-old who deserved to believe in magic, and my stillborn daughter who never could. I managed to  do it somehow, holding it together and feeling like a traitor all the while. It hurt to be alive when she wasn't, hurt to feel anything but pain. It hurt to wrap gifts for underprivileged children in her honor when I knew she would never tear through wrapping herself.

I survived the holidays though, by those small acts of kindness, by putting up an ornament on the tree in memory. I didn't need the reminder, that she was supposed to be here, that she was still loved, still part of our family, but it helped that year. That ornament was something tangible. It still is. A crystal angel, protective of the fragile pink heart she holds in her hand.

For a long time, I moved robotically through December. It is hard to see yourself feeling anything but the ache when you're in the bowels of despair, hard to see how the sun will shine again, how you will ever find any joy in this season ever again. After all, grief was love with nowhere to go.

But love, as I learned over the years, was still very much a part of this season. It is alive in those of us that remain, love itself has so much more to give to those around us, to ourselves. Even amid tears, and that ache we all know well, love continues giving, unselfishly, and without reservation. Love is that gentle nudge awake when you feel like crawling under the covers and staying there. Love is that willingness to experience life in a new, more acutely aware way. I read somewhere that at the center of grief is love that is not contained in a body at the center of grief. So maybe, at the center of grief is love that has everywhere to go.