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

An emotion-focused journal

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.

We can simply — or complicatedly — let it be.

We needn’t eschew grief to be happy, and we needn’t decry happiness in order to feel grief. This is a trap of the dualistic mind, and it is life-limiting rather than life-affirming.

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.

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

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.

assert that being happy does not mean we do not feel pain or grief or sadness — successively or, often, simultaneously. Sorrow and contentment, grief and beauty, longing and surrender coexist in the realm of sameness.