In her poem The Uses of Sorrow, Mary Oliver writes “Someone I loved once / gave me a box full of darkness. / It took me years to understand that / this, too, was a gift.”
Your recent holiday season has likely been full of gifts – whether they came in the form of brightly wrapped and waiting beneath the Christmas tree or the subtle warmth of companionship and precious time spent with those who we love and are loved by.
It’s difficult to imagine that our grief might number among these gifts.
But as we are reminded by author Jamie Anderson “grief… is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love that gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
The fact that we feel so acutely the pain of a loss is proof that we have loved, and that we continue to love. It is a reminder of the impact that another soul has had on our lives and of the indelible imprint they have left behind in our hearts.
To love and be loved – even when that love comes in the form of grief, packaged in Mary Oliver’s box full of darkness – that is a gift.
As the New Year unfolds before us, full of promise and potential, our love and our grief will come along with us. And – when we embrace it – we allow it to shape the way in which we move through the world and through this new year. The gift of our grief is that it can offer guidance – a roadmap written onto our hearts, which leads us toward enduring connections with those who we love and have lost.
If we chose to listen, to embrace that comingled love and grief, what might it ultimately teach us?
