When Grief Became Love
Along with this essay, I’m offering two no-cost experiential Zooms this week for anyone who’d like to explore these themes together. Information follows below.
There are experiences that become tipping points, after which life can never quite be seen the same way again.
My father’s passing was one of those for me.
Dad was my favorite person on the planet.
For the last ten years of his life, we lived in the same condo community in Florida. We played golf almost every week, shared countless dinners, and he often accompanied me to social gatherings. We introduced ourselves as “the Sids,” he Sid Jr. and me Sid III. It never stopped making us smile.
The prospect of his departure had always felt unfathomable to me. In fact, some fear of losing him had been with me since I was probably ten years old. Dad was forty when I was born, older than most of the fathers of my friends, and somewhere in the background of my life were lingering thoughts of losing him.
And I dreaded that day.
Then it came.
What happened was so different from what I had imagined.
For the first few weeks after Dad’s passing, tears flowed like a river. I would think of him and they would come. Friends called and visited. Emails arrived. There were family matters to take care of, conversations to have, things to do. And through all of it, the tears accompanied me throughout my days.
What surprised me was how much I loved them.
I loved my tears.
They felt so full of Dad. Full of appreciation. Full of gratitude. Full of connection. Full of the extraordinary privilege of having loved this man and having been loved by him. What kept coming through wasn’t only my love for Dad. It was the feeling of having been loved by him for nearly sixty years.
The tears felt like love in liquid form.
And then, about three weeks after Dad’s passing, perhaps from the fullness of having felt so much, the tears mostly stopped.
To my great surprise, that felt tragic.
I missed them.
This was almost the exact opposite of everything I had imagined grief would be. I had spent much of my life fearing the pain that would come with losing Dad. Yet when the pain finally arrived, I found something inside it that I never knew was there. I found love. And when the tears began to disappear, I wanted them back.
Something fundamental changed in me through that experience.
My relationship with loss began to change. My relationship with impermanence changed. Something softened in the grasping toward the people I love, the friendships and relationships I want to hold onto, even the material things that can sometimes seem so important to my happiness.
Because grief had revealed something to me.
Why do we miss someone? Because we love them.
Why does their absence hurt? Because their presence mattered so deeply.
The grief, the missing, the ache, the longing, even the sense of absence… they all seemed to be made of the same thing.
Love.
I share this because I simply didn’t know this was possible.
For most of my life, I imagined losing Dad so very differently from what actually happened. I imagined grief primarily as something terrible I would someday have to endure. I never imagined that I might treasure my tears. I never imagined that grief itself could be such an intimate way to experience my love for him.
During Dad’s final days, and again in the weeks following his passing, I facilitated groups where I shared my grief and loss and others did the same with their own experiences. I don’t know exactly what role those groups played in this change in me, but I suspect they helped me trust the grief instead of resisting it.
Since then, facilitating grief groups has become an especially tender part of my work.
We gather and notice whatever is here. Sometimes there are parts wanting the grief to disappear. Sometimes there is fear of being overwhelmed by it. Sometimes our protective systems allow us to come only so close. All of that gets welcomed.
And when there is some willingness to move toward the grief, we become curious about how deeply we can meet it in the body. How fully we can feel it. How gently we can accompany it and allow it to reveal itself.
Together we practice welcoming whatever appears. Sometimes, almost without noticing, fear gives way to curiosity. And every so often, something we thought was unbearable begins to reveal itself as love.
And sometimes, as we stay very close to the felt experience, something extraordinary happens. The grief begins to reveal what it is made of.
I continue to miss Dad. I catch myself wishing I could call him after something wonderful happened, hear his voice, laugh with him, ask him a question, and simply have him here.
Just as often, I find myself thinking, “Dad would love this,” before remembering I can’t pick up the phone.
And now even the missing feels like another way of loving him. I’ve come to treasure each moment of missing.
Since then, grief became less an experience I needed to fear and more a place where I could meet life intimately. A place where loss and love somehow touch.
Perhaps that is why welcoming grief, wherever and however it appears, has become such an expression of love in my life and in my work.
Perhaps this is one of the many gifts Dad continues to give me.
To discover that even when someone I love dearly has passed, that love can remain astonishingly present.
Sometimes as tears.
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To join our community no-cost experiential Zoom exploring the transmutation of grief and loss–or the love shining through–this Wed or Thur, visit https://conta.cc/3Utxiwf
If this speaks to something in your own experience, for more future groups, you are warmly invited to join our no-cost community Zooms through EffortlessIFS.com. I’m also happy to create a private Zoom or in-person exploration for small groups around grief or whatever feels most alive, or to join your workshop, retreat, or online gathering for an Effortless or Nondual IFS cameo.
🙏 Sid Friedman
