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

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

difficulties may arise when we use “normal life” to evade grief.

We may discern that the easy path isn’t always the right path. And everyone and everything can become our teacher. Children and strangers teach us. Animals teach us. When we are truly awake, even an ordinary moment teaches us something. Grieving itself is a learning process.

The more we practice staying with the emotions that we think may overcome us, the more we trust our ability to fully inhabit grief.

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.

An emotion-focused journal

And so once we have emerged from the seismic crisis of loss, what does pausing to be with grief look like? The basic tenets of this revolution are to cultivate self-awareness, emotional transparency, and self-compassion.

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

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.