LOVE DOESN’T DIE. Love endures forever.
Your mother, your father, your brother, your wife, your best friend, whoever you lost still loves you, and their inability to act on that love is why we grieve. Those of us left behind are asked to manage the pain of unrequited unconditional love. Love that is never returned in the way we want it to be by the people we’ve lost. This is the source of our pain. The greater the love, the greater the pain. Fundamentally, love is both action and feeling. It serves as the foundation for our most important and secure attachments. We love our parents, our spouses, and our friends because of the way they treat us. Their actions to care for us, to support us, translate into feelings of love. When they die and stop being able to engage with us in the same way, what happens to all of that love? Does it just disappear? No.
Love doesn’t die, and that is why we grieve. You don’t get over love. Loving someone and being loved in return leaves an indelible imprint on your brain. It cannot be erased, because love can’t be taken away, can’t be taken back, even if our person is no longer with us in this world. Death forces us to continually recalibrate our expectations around love. The foundation of a full life after loss is love. It is choosing to continue to love your person in the present tense. It is moving forward with life, bringing them with you. It is deciding how to love them and how to continue to experience their love forever.
We are conditioned to view death as the end of the story, but that’s a half-truth. Death is also a beginning. It’s the beginning of your life without your person physically beside you here on earth, and it’s also the beginning of a new relationship with your person. Death asks us to figure out how to pull them forward, how to bring them into a new future with you.
That commitment to finding a way, to accessing the things to heal, launched my quest years ago to understand the true nature of grief. I needed to understand why our losses cause so much pain, but also what we do about it. In the summer of 2020, I found my answer in an unexpected place: the pain of racism.
The day after George Floyd’s murder, Matt found me curled up in a ball on the floor of my office, sobbing uncontrollably, unable to process his death and the burden of Blackness. In the days that followed, I found myself obsessing over the relationship between grief and love. My mother’s love for me, my love for her, the grief experienced in my quest to become a mother, and the love Black people have been crying out for generations. Begging for a country that once recorded our value in ledgers alongside cattle and horses to acknowledge our grief and show us the love we deserve. The rallying cry Black Lives Matter is fundamentally rooted in an absence of love. I thought about how much I love being Black and how much grief, anxiety, and fear being Black sometimes brings. No matter what I do, no matter how much I love my country, my country continues to give me things to grieve. As I witnessed our nation’s “racial reckoning” amid the backdrop of a disproportionate rise in COVID-19 deaths in the Black community thanks to systemic racism, I mourned.
As I gave myself space to grieve, I found myself unable to separate my questions about grief and survival from love. I regularly yearned for the love and support of my mother during those painful months of death, disease, racial uprising, and isolation. As I contemplated the nature of Black grief in particular, I wound up in a public conversation on Instagram with Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin. Sybrina suffered deep personal grief as a direct result of racism and white supremacy when her son was killed by a white vigilante in 2012. During our chat, when I asked her how she continues to cope with her loss, Sybrina said, “I still love my son, and I know my son still loves me.” Her use of the present tense was jarring to me. I knew my mom loved me, and I loved my mom, but I wondered to myself, could I carry that love into the present tense? And is love the path to resiliency after death? Instead of getting over it, we stay in it. We keep loving our people in the present tense, and that is how we live with the pain of loss. And for Black people, loving ourselves, deeply loving ourselves no matter what, is how we live with the pain of racism. Grief is love, and love is the antidote to grief.
In retrospect, it all feels painfully obvious. Of course I still love my mother in the present tense; that’s why I miss her so damn much. And of course she still loves me; in death, she is still my mother, and I am still her child. The unconditional love we share with others does not end; if anything it grows. And that’s why none of this is meant to be overcome. This is why there are no time lines or properly ordered steps. Love isn’t something you conquer or control, and neither is the ensuing pain of loss. Both are simply meant to be lived. It took me twelve years, a pregnancy loss, a pandemic, and a racial uprising to recognize that I am not in control of my grief or my love. I love who I love, and I grieve because I love. Love is not meant to be contained by death. Its strength defies the grave if we give ourselves permission to find it.
I find my mother and her love when I’m the best version of myself, when I’m kind and generous and loving and caring for others the way she cared for me. I find her in my husband’s desire to follow the rules and do things the “right” way when I would rather rush through something. I find her love in my sister’s generous spirit. I see her in my hilarious and joyful niece JJ, and I can always taste her memory whenever I bite into a perfectly constructed chocolate chip cookie. I find her within and without, and most of all, I find her in the water.
I know she lives in the water. I see us stuck in time in the swimming pool at what was once the IBM Country Club. The pool where she sat on the edge with me on her feet. The pool where she would kick her legs and send me flying through the air and into water. The pool where I will always be safe, carefree, and loved. She’s in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Puerto Rico, home of her ancestors. She is at Lake George, the site of one of our last family vacations. She is in the purity, the strength, the fluidity, and the life-sustaining power of water.
Just because I’ve found her and her love does not mean I live a life absent of the pain of grief. At the end of the day, her love, as real as it is, as present as it is, is still lacking because she isn’t here with me. The pain we experience, whether surrounding the death of a loved one or life in a country that still views us as chattel, is the sting of unrequited love. It is the feeling of lack that comes when your love isn’t returned the way you want it to be. My mother is with me every day. I can find her, I can call on her, I can ask her for advice, I can include her in my life in big and small ways, but I can’t pick up the phone and call her. I can’t hold her hand. I can’t text her for her famous bread pudding recipe. Instead, I have to honestly acknowledge her absence, I have to let myself feel the impact of this life-changing loss, and I have to let myself grieve.
If you are a human being capable of love and all of the wonder, awe, and joy that come with it, then you are also capable of feeling a deep sense of loss, despair, and sorrow when someone you love crosses over into death. Let yourself grieve. Do not follow my instructions, but use this book to navigate and validate your own unique grief experience.
When all I want is to put my head in my mom’s lap and let her rub my back and tell me everything will be okay; when I feel frustrated or sick or just not like myself, and all I want is my mom, I close my eyes, inhale deeply, and go there. I’m back in my childhood home, in my parents’ bedroom, with my head in her lap. It is not the same. It is imperfect, and I am not comforted the way I was as a child, but I can still feel her love. You can access their love, their energy indefinitely because it’s in you. It hasn’t gone away. Everything they poured into you over the years didn’t die when they died.
But because it is not the same, because there is no replacement for the person you lost, you have to build up that love within yourself. It is the only way to continue to move forward. You have to ask yourself, what is required to live in the midst of loss today? What do I need in order to be okay without my dad, my daughter, my child? Their love is certainly still there, but their physical presence isn’t, so what do you need to do for you to be okay when you can’t run into their arms or reach for their hand?
Know that each day is different, and only you can answer that question. As you learn to live without their physical presence in the world, your love for them grows. Their absence on this Earth forces you to recognize just how much love existed between the two of you. You are better able to see after death all that they gave you in life. Your appreciation, your respect, your gratitude, and ultimately your love are all magnified as you are forced to repeatedly acknowledge the depth of your loss. As you reimagine your life without them, as you surrender over and over again to the impact your grief has on your life, as you learn to navigate the “andness” of your emotions, and as you figure out how to once again open your heart up to love someone else unconditionally, you become more and more aware of their life. You become increasingly cognizant of all they gave you. You understand at a deeper level just how much they truly love you.
Lay claim to their love. I spent a lot of time on the floor of my office crying thanks to the isolation of the pandemic. I was forced to simply be with my feelings, and I was miserable. There were no distractions to be found, and the world was full of sorrow. As I sat in this moment of deep personal and global grief, I decided to choose love. I committed to loving my mother in the present tense. I committed to continuing to hold love in my heart for this little bundle of cells that didn’t make it. I committed to loving my Blackness in the midst of racism and white supremacy. Most importantly, I committed to loving myself as much as my mother loves me and as much as I love her. I decided to love all parts of myself, even the pieces I don’t like as much, because that is what unconditional love requires. In the absence of my mother’s loving actions, without her here to remind me to be kind to myself, to be patient with my body, and to stop acting as though I’m a machine, I needed to take responsibility for those things myself. For all of it. I realized I couldn’t love myself unconditionally while also chastising myself for feeling too much, for crying too much, for my body taking too long to heal. That’s just not how it works. I committed to embracing unconditional love for myself and my mother and, in the process, I realized that this is the deepest form of acceptance.
Accept that you do not physically have the deepest desires of your heart and hold those desires with love anyway. The people you so badly want to hold, you can almost touch them with your hands. The people whose absence causes you to occasionally mourn or to wail. Accepting that you cannot lay claim to these people you love dearly hurts, but unconditional love requires acceptance.
We accept that our spouse only listens to us 70 percent of the time, we accept that every single night our child will run through a list of questions and requests in order to delay bedtime, we accept the friend who always runs ten minutes late because you know she loves you, but how do we accept death? How do we quell the longing that seemingly never ceases?
You don’t. The longing is your love, and love isn’t meant to be contained or quelled. The only thing that makes the longing more bearable is simply expecting it, and accepting it as a normal part of your life after death. There is nothing wrong with your feelings. You have to learn to support yourself, to soothe yourself, and to love yourself to the best of your ability. No matter how the world views or values you, you have to value yourself. You are worthy of the time and space that your grief requires forever. There is nothing wrong with you if you are still nursing a broken heart, and it’s been years since your person’s death. The only way you get to a place where grief and joy can exist simultaneously is by understanding that you are of value, that your feelings matter, and those feelings are worthy of expression. You will only allow yourself to access all of the things that healing requires if you truly value yourself. Many of us never access full healing because we allow others to determine our value. Do not do this. You deserve the space you need to heal even if the world tries to deny you.
Once you acknowledge your worth, surrender fully to your grief, and access the care you need to heal, you will find yourself able to deeply and intentionally love your person and feel their love for you in return. A space opens up in your heart, and even in the midst of this absence you will carry forever, you begin to feel whole. When you fully accept their absence, that hole can be filled with love. Sometimes love on its own, sometimes love with a side of grief, but love nonetheless. Continuing to feel their love will sustain you. Their love and the love you have for yourself is what will get you through the worst of your grief.
Let love buoy you.