“Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional”
Despite popular belief that the Entertainment Industry has made us to believe, life hurts sometimes. It can hurt real bad, it can hurt when you don’t expect it to, it can hurt when you don’t want it to, it can also hurt when you have the least strength to face it. It comes in when it wants and it simply is a rude guest. A lot of us go through grief and the pain of losing a loved one is unbearable. It’s like they say, the hurt of losing someone who meant something to you is a wound that never really heals, it dries over time and just when you think you forgot about it, a small contact can hurt the wound back again. An anniversary, a picture, a photo or a memory and you’re back to realising it still hurts, the wound is still there.
Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable.
It is a schlocky deal. You want the love but you don’t get just that. If you don’t want the grief, then you don’t get the love. And that makes us human after all, we’re willing to take the grief to experience love, even if it’s for a while. To go through the motion of pain and the hurt of the world crashing down just to feel that acquaintance with love. And then when grief comes knocking, we pretend like it was never part of the deal. But grief comes to stay and it ain’t leaving.
Loosing someone you loved is what we all wish nobody has to go through but one thing time teaches us is that the more you feel the grief, the deeper the love was, the more you can’t get over it simply means there was a lot of it happening. And at the end, life teaches us that rather than dwelling on the loss, you cherish what happened. To not be sad that it’s over but to simply be happy it happened.
To anyone battling grief, I know it sounds wrong but you are truly a privileged human being. The reason you have grief is because you had something beautiful and that makes you a person who knows what love is, it makes your life, one worth living. You got to experience something a lot of people wish they had. Yes, it stinks, yes it hurts and yes the rains aren’t washing away the pains of yesterday but you’ve been touched by love, you’ve been taken to a place of beauty and you know what it’s like to feel the warmth of humanity. And that makes you, one lucky human. Something a lot of people wished they had even for a single moment. Maybe you held for a moment but you loved a lifetime and that is what life is all about.
It hurts because it mattered!