Without Grief, There is No Love

Remembering my late grandmother.

My grandmother passed on Thanksgiving last week. How clearly, to me, this represents how intertwined grief and gratitude are. To grieve means you were lucky enough to have had what you’ve lost. As A.A. Milne (as Winnie the Pooh) put it, “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

To grieve the loss of my grandmother feels strikingly like loving my grandmother. The opportunity to reflect upon her life and what she has meant to me amplifies the gratitude I have toward her. The ache of losing is accompanied by the fullness of what has been lived.

Is that so surprising, that grief feels an awful lot like love? It is as if they come almost from the same place; that they exist right alongside each other. Though they may present differently, grief and love walk hand in hand. To open yourself up to love is to open yourself up to grief, too. As sad as it may be, grief is an important part of life, and of love. Too easily, I think, we forget one in the presence of the other.

In remembering what my grandmother has left behind, there is so much I can learn from her. She modeled what it looks like to fully accept what is—she lived in a state of surrender to the present moment, unafraid of the future, for as long as I knew her. She had been so accepting of her impending death for years before it came; she welcomed it, even. Perhaps this is a grace that old age offers: it becomes easier to surrender to the inevitable.

My grandmother was a woman who accepted people for exactly who they were before it was cool; who provided hospice for AIDS patients in the late 80s; who always had room for more at her dinner table. She rarely shied away from a challenge—she had 11 children, after all—and in all the years I knew her, she maintained an air of calm enthusiasm, warmth, and delight. She was the kind of grandmother who did bake cookies every time you went to visit: and, those cookies were always slightly burned, just the way she liked them.

Most notably to me, my grandma was a woman who sustained her wit, memory, intelligence and coherence by reading thousands of books—biographies, novels, memoirs, historical fiction—and constantly relaying new information she’d learned from them to anyone who would listen. She continued to read multiple books each week until three days before she died, when she no longer could. This is a legacy I plan to carry on in her honor: to never stop learning, to never give up curiosity, to always keep reading.

Although my grandmother was Catholic, it seems that she had somehow come to understand what the Buddha taught—that it is not desire that causes suffering, but clinging to what we desire. My grandmother did not create unnecessary suffering for herself by clinging to anything—she lived with an open palm; rarely grasping for control. She let go of material desires and accepted each moment for what it was just-like-that.

That must be what they call wisdom, right.

I wonder if the ability to accept more readily what comes and to quit resisting reality is something we will all learn with age. I wonder if letting go and surrendering is the work of a lifetime, no matter how old you get.

I do know that the openness and acceptance my grandmother lived with is something I greatly admire, and seek to emulate. The curiosity she maintained for 91 years is a quality I’m so grateful to have inherited, and one I will continue to cultivate. Truly, how lucky my family is to have had her for so long.

To my grandma: Thank you. I love you, and I’ll never stop reading.

* * *

Confronting the reality that people you love will leave your life is a brutal part of continuing to live. It’s hard, and it hurts. But that’s the cost we must pay by saying yes to this life—by choosing to keep loving, we choose to keep grieving as well.

In some ways, it would feel easier, to close ourselves off to love to protect ourselves from the grief that accompanies it. But, as I think most of us know, doing the opposite—opening up to love, and to grief—is what generates fulfillment, and puts us in touch with the most magnificent, rewarding, and yes, painful, experiences.

May we seek to learn from our experiences with grief; may we let it remind us of all that we have to be grateful for. May we allow ourselves to love more deeply.

May we honor what death teaches us about life: may we appreciate fully the years we get to spend alive.

Maggie