What goes together hand in hand.
In other words, taking on the work of healing involves more heartbreak, and more grief.
Tiago Forte • The Heart Is the Bottleneck
Holding space for families as they journey through the wilderness of bereavement necessitates a willingness to honor what makes people brave. It could be rock-solid faith; it could be a profound love for another. Bravery may be rooted in an interpretation that includes visions of an afterlife.
Amy Wright Glenn • Holding Space: On Loving, Dying, and Letting Go
C. S. Lewis once observed that grief is not a state but a process. It’s a river that runs through a long valley, and at every turn a new landscape is revealed, and yet somehow it repeats and repeats.
David Brooks • How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
the grieving heart does not care for logic, and it refuses comparisons.
Teju Cole • Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time (Berlin Family Lectures)
Yet the fundamental loss remains—it doesn’t just dissipate—and, in a strange way, I think it can become a magnet for other losses. We come to see we are all simply creatures carrying around our ever-deepening loss. Small griefs seem to collect around the bigger primary grief. I think this realization allows us to become a true human being.