Grief and Growth

Love is a pathway to growth. It’s not the only path, but love is unique in that it challenges us to grow both inwardly and outwardly. Love invites us to explore the inward realm of our emotions, and it also calls us outward, draws us outside our own experiences, viewpoints and habits to participate in a couple, in family, and in community.

Grief is one of our most intense experiences of love; so if love is a doorway to growth, then grief, too, is an invitation to growth.

When I lost Bonnie, seven years ago, my focus was on getting through the experience, not growing through it. But because I received grief as experience of love, I was in no hurry to get over grief, or to get rid of it. I explored my grief, writing in my journal; I spoke about grief to others, and ultimately that writing and speaking became my book, Loving Grief. That has led to countless conversations about grief, and with each conversation, the importance of grief as an opportunity for growth becomes clearer to me. It doesn’t matter if our grief is for a person who has died, for a marriage that has dissolved, for a time or place where we long to return; in grief we experience ourselves reaching for someone or something that we deeply love.

Grief challenges us to hold both ends of the spectrum of love. Grief stretches us so that we can hold the extreme sorrow of love, and in stretching that far into the shadows, we’re also able to grow and stretch toward the light, toward the ecstasy that is possible for us as loving beings.

All this growth starts with allowing grief to be, and seeing it as an expression of our love.