Grief is the Price of Love
Grief is the Price of Love
Excerpt from See No Stranger by Valarie Kaur[1]
Grief is the price of love. Loving someone means that one day, there will be
grieving. They will leave you, or you will leave them. The more you love, the
more you grieve. Loving someone also means grieving with them. It means letting
their pain and loss bleed into your own heart. When you see that pain coming,
you may want to throw up the guardrails, sound the alarm, raise the flag, but you
must keep the borders of your heart porous in order to love well. Grieving is an
act of surrender.
Many of us are taught to avoid grief and to fear suffering and death. Our
dead are wheeled out of sight, their bodies incinerated behind crematorium walls
or buried beneath sterile marble tile. But grieving openly is an ancient practice. In
our blood lie memories of ancestors who participated in grief rituals in all corners
of the world: drums and fire, music and moaning, incense and incantations,
bodies burned in moonlight, ashes poured into silver waters. We know how to
grieve. We just have to remember it. The wisdom across faith traditions is that
grieving is done in community.
Grief does not come in clean stages: It is more like the current of a river,
sweeping us into new emotional terrain, twisting and turning unexpectedly. In one moment we need to cry and rage, in another we feel nothing at all, and in another
we feel a sense of acceptance, until we find ourselves one day sobbing on the
steering wheel of a car as a song plays on the radio. Grief has no end really. There
is no fixing it, only bearing it. The journey is often painful, but suppressing grief
is what causes the real damage—depression, loneliness, isolation, addiction, and
violence. When we are brave enough to sit with our pain, it deepens our ability to
sit with the pain of others. It shows us how to love them.
Some forms of grief are impossible to bear alone. In the wake of trauma,
when it feels like we’re thrown into a hole, we need to be able to tell the story of
what happened in order to return to a sense of community. We must be able to
say: This was wrong and must not happen again. Telling the story is the prerequisite to justice. But for the story to matter, someone we trust must be listening. It is not easy to listen. A story of violence is like “a living presence transmitted in real time, entering the body of those who are listening,” says Elizabeth Rosner, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. “Something entirely unbearable that must, somehow, be borne, and then passed on.”[2] But it is worth it.
Grieving together, bearing the unbearable, is an act of transformation: It brings
survivors into the healing process, creates new relationships, and energizes the
demand for justice. We come to know people when we grieve with them through
stories and rituals. It is how we build real solidarity, the kind that shows us the
world we want to live in—and our role in fighting for it.
Valarie Kaur is a renowned civil rights leader, lawyer, award-winning filmmaker, educator, innovator, and best-selling author of See No Stranger. She is the founder of the Revolutionary Love Project, where she leads a movement to reclaim love as a force for justice. https://valariekaur.com/
[1] Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love. (One World, 2020), 43-4.
[2] Elizabeth Rosner, Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory
(Berkeley, Counterpoint, 2017), 32.