It hurts so much, because you loved so much!

That is something, I have heard a lot of these past few months and I know it is true. Yet for the longest time I would try and separate the two, because I saw love and grief as being two different things. Yet you can not have one without the other, they tend to feed into one another and become entangled within our lives.

But now, now I am at a point in my life, where I can see how grief is another way in which we love someone. It is perhaps the most painful of ways, because with that love comes the anger of their passing, of not getting to witness their life journey anymore, not being able to share your life with them. And then comes the resentment, of having to live this life without them by your side. Frustration and confusion follows because how do we love someone who is no longer with us on the physical plane, all this love we have for them, can it truly live on in your words and memories.

Of course it can, it lives on in us and in our children and in the people whom we celebrate the life of those we lost. Once the anger and resentment resides a little, all this becomes clearer. However the anger and resentment will come back, because is part of the journey.

Grief really represents love's unwillingness to give up. It keeps finding a way through all the heartbreak and sorrow to survive. Because love is a force that wants to carry on and we need to find new ways in which to celebrate the love we have for those that have passed on.

We all know that love can be all consuming and that it can get very complicated. There are times in our lives when we have no control over it, because we can not choose who we fall in love with. And then we can end up losing ourselves in love, becoming enmeshed with the other person. In this way love can become destructive, because it can strip us back, until we are laid bare before our loved ones. But destruction is not always a bad thing, destruction is an opportunity to learn. To see ourselves for who we are and to love and accept ourselves , warts and all.

But it does not always go that way, that is a choice we must make , the choice to love ourselves instead of looking for someone else to do that for us. Because if we keep running from ourselves into the arms of some one else we will never really understand what love is all about. What true love is all about, because everything in life needs to start with self, before we can expect to share it with some one else.

Grief is not something we should run away from, it is something we need to embrace. To allow ourselves to feel and as painful as it is, to realize that the pain just brings us closer to those that we have loved and lost.

My love for my sister is fuelled by the love she has for me. It is the way in which she lives on and even though my grief is painful, it is what keeps us connected.

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