Love and Grief
Love and grief. It could have been the first post for this blog, or the last, but it wants to be here.
Who knows where grief came from? Perhaps grief-to-be was the runt of a litter of high-octane emotions inside our Stone Age ancestors that warned them of fearsome beasts and predatory fellow humans they might face at any moment. This was a warning that humans needed all the more at the end of a long day of hunting as they kicked off their sandals and relaxed on the banks of a tranquil stream.
Grief-to-be, as runt of the litter, had the leisure to stand at the back of a crowd of grumbling scolds and contemplate the pleasure that humans could experience, while also foreseeing their inevitable end in violence and death. Finally, perhaps, in this evolutionary scenario, a deep emotional response to loss came to be known as grief, marking a new stage of human development.
But back to the present day.
There’s a saying you may have heard: ‘Grief is the price we pay for love.’ It makes intuitive sense when you first hear it, but I don’t buy it. Too puritanical, judgmental. It diminishes both love and grief.
If we must talk in terms of cost, then love is the price we pay for love. Grief is the price we pay for grief. And grief is a form of love, not a mere shadow of the moment when life showed itself in its brightest colors and was gone like a flick of the wrist.
It takes courage to be present with a person shrouded in grief. You know the cause but are taken aback by the strangeness, the harshness of grief’s work on them. To stay with them anyway, following their signals not your own anxiety, is a form of love, and of witnessing. But how can we be with and for others in their grief if our starting point is grief’s opposite?
There’s another saying—‘Crossing the Rubicon,’ for passing the point of no return. In 47 B.C. Julius Caesar illegally crossed the river Rubicon from Gaul into Italy, leading to civil war and the end of the Roman Republic. It was a bold move that defines bold moves. But Caesar knew the forces that would oppose him when he crossed the Rubicon, and he had an army behind him. Today we have few symbols, ceremonies, and signs to guide us in supporting people who grieve. We need more of them.
Yet some people can cross the Rubicon without such signs and reach others in their grief, loneliness, or depression. It’s a gift, one that has to be practiced. Many lack such innate skills and inclinations toward others in need. But many of them can learn.
In The Bear, a TV series on Hulu, a pastry chef is sent to study with a master pastry chef who tells him of his own internship, and his desire to best his teacher. Finally, he says, he realized he would never be able to surpass his teacher.
Watching this episode I expected the chef to end his story with, “But I could still be a master chef in a good restaurant,” or “I couldn’t beat him, but I could equal him.” Instead he says (I paraphrase), “I decided to stick to my teacher like glue, to watch everything he did, to memorize and practice it and then come back and learn more about it, the same way, over and over again, with every dish he made.”
The chef’s energy and ambition had not abated, but his goal had changed. The practice of empathy may be something like this. There are no prize competitions for it, and few have titles to go with their gift and skills. Empathy practices on a different field.
