Grief comes in all sizes, because loss comes in all sizes. Small sadnesses happen every day, and we mark them and move on. Intense sadness comes to everyone eventually, and we struggle not to be overwhelmed by it. One solution is detachment: you do not feel loss so keenly because you were never attached to the lost one in the first place. Another solution is to recognize that grief can offer profound learning. It can be “the garden of compassion” to quote Rumi. It is the way we come to understand and empathize with another’s deep feeling.
1. Every tear is a womb which can birth new life.
2. Grief is the narrow passage through which we pass from death to life.
They’re carted off like cattle,
yet we’d refuse a bed
to those who flee from carnage
now drowned, or lost or dead?
Some leaves in winter dangle on
Though wrinkled, fragile, old
Stubborn leaves that flinch on empty trees
Through cruel storms in damning cold
