Grief is the Tax on Loving People

A friend of mine recently shared the grief she was experiencing over the loss of her husband of thirty-eight years. He’s been gone for over a decade and she was taken aback by a fresh wave of despair that had suddenly surfaced, startling her.

Processing the frustration of that surprise sadness, I found myself feeling the muscle memory of my own journey with grief. If you’ve said goodbye to someone you love, whether ten days, ten months, or ten years ago, you aren’t a stranger to the painful and unannounced intrusions.

As those of us who’ve experienced loss here understand, our mourning is not linear or orderly. It doesn’t follow a rational or reliable path. Though we may reach clearings or come to understand or accept certain things (at least intellectually) emotionally we are always susceptible to deja vu. We don’t ever settle things and move beyond grief, we simply move ahead with a deficit that will leave us forever changed, with an injury that will never completely heal—with a debt we won’t ever be clear of.

Nothing in this life comes for free, even though we sometimes imagine it does.

Everything valuable we receive needs to be paid for somehow.

Eventually the bill comes due for all of us, no matter how hard we try to avoid it.

Death demands payment, too.

When the separation happens between us and the people who mean the most to us, the instant they are gone—we suddenly realize how much the closeness is going to cost. We learn that we are going to pay for a lifetime in profound sadness, in tears that come from nowhere, in holidays that will never be the same, in loneliness that creeps up and sucker punches us.

Grief is the tax on loving people.

It is the inevitable price for being loved well; necessary payment on the accrued capital gains of intimacy and memories and time with them.

The morning I found out that my father had died, immediately I began paying for everything: the mid-day naps together when I was a toddler, spontaneous trips to get ice cream, car rides home from roller skating, passionate cheers from the bleachers even when I was riding the bench, thousands of seemingly ordinary family dinners,  long drives to the beach for vacations, countless calls just to see how I was, delivery room celebrations, decades of inside jokes—an infinite portfolio of beautiful memories. 

For the forty-four years I was fortunate enough to have my father, I was wealthy in love, and so now I am rich in loss.
That's how this works.
It has to work that way because if it didn't hurt as much as it does, if it didn't merit the tears and the breakdowns and the present emptiness—it probably wouldn't have been as beautiful as it was.

When I find myself sitting with people who are grieving, I know there is no fixing what feels broken, no magic words to help them sidestep the hell, no alleviating the scalding pain, no way I can spare them any of the sadness—and it's a good thing that I can't. I try to remind them that the severity of the pain in separation now, is confirmation of the strength of the connection then. Their tears are a tribute.

When we lose parents, and friends, and partners, and children, and people who matter to us the pain is profound and ever-present—but we can take solace in its severity, because we know we lived with an embarrassment of riches to begin with. We were known and cared for and treasured, and we lived close enough to someone to memorize the shape of their hands and the sound of their laughter and the smell of their heads and the billion idiosyncrasies that only we were close enough to discover. That is worth whatever we have to spend in mourning now.

If you find yourself freshly grieving and frustrated today, ask yourself:

Would I rather have this terrible pain or lose all memory and experience with the person I love? Because we cannot sidestep the former without giving up the latter. We get to grieve.

I'll be paying back the tax on being my father's son for the rest of my life, and as unbearable as it often is—I'm happy to pay it because I will always come out ahead, I will never be fully in deficit, I will always be in the black.

Grief is a small penalty for the immeasurable treasure of loving and being loved.