Part One of the grief series.
Grief is often described as the pain of losing someone we love. But I wonder if that description is incomplete.
When we lose a spouse or a deeply intertwined partner, we don’t only lose them.
We lose part of us.
We lose the we.
I have not lost a spouse to death, and I would not pretend to fully understand that experience. But the death of my son and the unwanted end of my marriage have both taught me something about what happens when an identity built around we is forced back into me.
Over years together, two separate lives begin weaving themselves into something that exists psychologically almost as a third entity.
We like this restaurant.
We don’t usually stay out late.
We need to get the pool cleaned.
We should probably call the kids.
We are going on vacation.
Without realizing it, I and you become we.
And that we develops a life of its own.
The Invisible Partner
Someone we live with long enough eventually takes up residence inside our own mind.
We anticipate what they will say.
We know what will make them laugh.
We know what will irritate them.
Walking through a grocery store, we see something they like and automatically think of them.
Something happens during the day and part of our mind stores it away:
I need to tell them about that.
Our thinking has become commingled.
The person becomes an anchor, companion, sounding board, irritation, comfort, witness, and refuge.
Sometimes we cherish them.
Sometimes we resent them.
Sometimes both before lunch.
That is partnership.
But underneath all those ordinary interactions, something much deeper has happened.
Our identity has quietly expanded from me into we.
Then One Day, “We” Disappears
Death does something brutally concrete.
A person who was there yesterday isn’t there today.
The chair is still there.
Their clothes may still be hanging in the closet.
Their phone number is still in the phone.
Their coffee cup may still be in the cabinet.
But they are gone.
And the mind does not know what to do with that.
For years it constructed a model of reality containing another person. Thousands upon thousands of thoughts, habits, expectations, and decisions incorporated them.
Then the external reality changes while the internal model remains.
The mind still says:
We.
Reality says:
You.
That collision may be one of the deepest sources of grief.
Who Am I Now?
The person who remains isn’t simply asking:
How do I live without this person?
There may be another question underneath it:
Who am I without this person?
The more interconnected two lives became, the more disorienting that question can be.
The ego may move through anger, vulnerability, self-pity, loneliness, confusion, fear, resentment, and profound sadness.
It may bargain with reality.
It may replay conversations.
What if we had gone to the doctor sooner?
What if I had noticed something?
What if I had said something differently?
Why did this happen?
Psychological time allows us to travel backward endlessly, trying to renegotiate something that can no longer be changed.
There may be no shortcut through this.
Perhaps there shouldn’t be.
Grief isn’t necessarily something malfunctioning inside us.
It may simply be what love feels like when the person we love is no longer physically present.
A Deeper Awareness Does Not Eliminate Grief
I don’t want to make what I call soul into an enlightened escape hatch where sufficiently spiritual people somehow rise above grief.
That doesn’t seem true to me.
A deeper awareness does not make us immune to hurt.
We can still miss someone.
We can still experience the tremendous emptiness left by another human being.
But perhaps awareness allows us to hold that pain differently.
The ego often argues with what happened.
Something quieter may slowly turn toward it.
The ego says:
This cannot be.
Awareness eventually whispers:
But it is.
Not because it likes what happened.
Not because the loss is fair.
Not because the person didn’t matter.
Precisely because they mattered so much.
Acceptance isn’t approval.
Acceptance is allowing reality to be reality.
The ego tries to protect us from loss and reverse what cannot be reversed. What I call soul may help us hold the loss without requiring reality to become something else.
And somewhere within that acceptance, grief may begin changing shape.
Love Does Not Have to Disappear
The strange thing about losing someone is that physical absence does not produce psychological absence.
The person continues living within us.
Their expressions remain.
Their jokes remain.
Their irritating habits remain.
Their advice sometimes appears inside our own thoughts.
Their influence has become incorporated into the person we are.
Whatever may or may not happen beyond death, I cannot prove.
But this much seems observable:
A relationship doesn’t vanish simply because one participant dies.
It changes form.
The conversations become internal.
The memories become precious.
The ordinary moments we barely noticed while living them sometimes become sacred afterward.
And gradually the question may change from:
How do I get over losing this person?
to:
How do I carry this person forward without requiring them to still be here?
That seems like a very different question.
Returning From “We” to “Me”
Perhaps one of the hardest parts of losing a spouse is slowly rediscovering the word I.
What do I want to eat?
Where do I want to go?
What does my morning look like?
Who am I becoming now?
At first those questions may feel almost disloyal.
They aren’t.
The old we does not need to be destroyed for a new me to emerge.
The relationship becomes part of the surviving person’s history, character, and consciousness.
The task isn’t forgetting.
It is integrating.
Grief Comes in Waves
Perhaps this is why grief behaves so much like the ocean.
For a while the water may become perfectly still.
We think:
Maybe I’m doing better.
Then something tiny happens.
A song.
A photograph.
A familiar restaurant.
A form asking for an emergency contact.
An empty place at the table.
And suddenly a wave that seemed nowhere in sight crashes over us.
We cry in a parking lot.
We lose our composure in front of strangers.
And sometimes, if we’re fortunate, another human being recognizes what is happening and simply puts their arms around us.
No philosophy.
No explanation.
No attempt to fix death.
Just another human being saying through their presence:
I see you.
Perhaps that is one of the purest forms of love.
The Larger Ocean
I have often used the ocean and the wave as metaphors for the soul.
A wave rises from the ocean, temporarily takes a recognizable form, travels for a while, and eventually disappears back into the water.
From the perspective of the wave, something has ended.
From the perspective of the ocean, nothing has ever stopped belonging.
I don’t know whether death literally works that way.
But I find something deeply meaningful in the metaphor.
Everything we experience comes and goes.
People arrive.
Relationships form.
Children grow.
Bodies age.
People leave.
Eventually we leave too.
Life breathes in.
Life breathes out.
Perhaps wisdom isn’t learning how to prevent the exhale.
Perhaps it is learning to treasure the inhale while it is happening.
And sometimes, without grief disappearing, the memory of the person we lost begins producing something alongside pain:
Gratitude.
Look what we had.
Look what we experienced.
Look how deeply I loved.
Look how deeply I was loved.
What I call soul doesn’t have to erase grief to find peace.
It can become large enough to hold both.
The sadness that they are gone.
And the extraordinary gratitude that they were ever here at all.
Continue to Part Two: When “Me” Begins to Move Forward