Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief

An emotion-focused journal

We own this pain, even on days when we wish it weren’t so. We needn’t give it away or allow anything, or anyone, to pilfer it. Through the grief and the love we can hold our heads high — even in tears, even shattered. What’s ours is ours — and rightfully.

trinity of self-awareness: learning, adapting, and trusting intuition.

Whatever comes, we let it be as it is. When we do this, we come to see, in this moment or the next, our emotions always moving.

The word selah (Hebrew: ) — “to pause, reflect, and feel meaning” — appears almost seventy times in the poetry of the Psalms. Grief by its nature is poetical, elegiac. And poetry, like grief, is subversive, unbridled, and disobedient. Poetry violates linguistic norms because it must. Poetry helps us feel. And when we allow ourselves to feel that wh

We have earned this grief, paying for it with love and steadfast devotion.

There is a wide range of emotions associated with grief, not just sadness and despair. We may become aware of a feeling of loneliness, for example, and, rather than deny, distract from, or repress the feeling, we pause and stay with it because we see it. Seeing it, we are awake and self-aware even amid the ache and unease.

Biochemically, crying may actually act as a stress-relief valve.

a certain sense, I suspect the bypassing of traumatic grief may be the greatest threat facing humankind today, responsible for immense suffering from addictions and abuse to social disconnection and perhaps even war. When we disconnect from our grief, we disconnect from ourselves. When we disconnect from ourselves, we disconnect from others and fro

Contemplating the death of those we love and feeling tremendous grief in the aftermath of so doing brings us face-to-face with what matters. It shows us what it means to be human is to be vulnerable, to suffer, and to risk love.