How Love Carries Us After Loss
Note: I wrote this reflection for anyone navigating the unfamiliar waters that follow loss. If you are there now, I hope these words bring a small sense of steadiness.
When someone we love dies, grief is like being thrown into a wild river.
The current is strong.
The water is cold.
You are carried further than you ever intended to go.
At first you fight the current.
But deep down you know there is no swimming back.
The river is carrying you somewhere you never intended to go.
And the river keeps moving.
Some mornings you wake up and for a brief moment everything feels normal.
Then the memory returns, and the water rushes in again.
I remember mornings like that after he was gone - the quiet realization that the world had changed overnight and would never quite be the same again.
And slowly, almost surprisingly, you begin to notice something.
You are still afloat.
Because the love you shared did not disappear.
It changed form.
The love you once shared has become the float that keeps you above the water.
Grief is often described as loss.
But that is not the whole truth.
Grief is also the echo of something beautiful.
The quiet trace of a love that was real.
Grief is not the opposite of love.
Grief is love continuing in a different form.
And sometimes, in the quiet after the storm, you begin to sense something else as well -
that love was never meant to disappear.
Only to change the way it travels with us.
The river may still be wild at times.
There may be moments when it feels as if the current will throw you under again.
But something has changed.
You know now that you are not alone in the river.
The love you shared is quietly keeping you above the water.
And slowly, almost without noticing,
you realize
you are still here.
You are alive.
You are safe.