DO NOT FEAR THE GRIEVING

When you look into the eyes of a loved one, you know that they will die one day, and "one day" could be today, and so it breaks your heart a little bit each time you look into their eyes.

This is not an error but the way it’s meant to be. True love brings an awareness of the loss of the beloved.

And so you stay with your grief today, you breathe into it and make a home for it in your heart, it hurts your chest and your throat and your tummy but it feels so alive, this grief, this loneliness, this yearning for home, and you feel so alive and awake in the hurt, and you want the hurt to stay with you because you want to keep your heart open to your loved one today. You don’t want to shut off to the "mysterium tremendum" of existence, and you don’t want to cling to that which will surely pass. You love your loved one through the grief, through the tears and the broken heart and the awareness of mortality, you live close to contingency and impermanence and change, and each moment with your loved one is rendered infinitely precious. You celebrate their presence today yet stay rooted in their passing. You embrace this living day, knowing it could be the final one, your final chance to meet.

Good. Let it all be final, then, and hauntingly alive in its finality.

Death is in life, not at its end. Grief is your constant companion, your guru and guide and lover, not a negative or depressing thing but a misunderstood doorway to cosmic compassion, to extraordinary hope and a deep and enduring love of life. All things will pass, all things are dying and changing in one way or another, everything we love and all that we don’t flows through our awareness unstoppably, ceaselessly, like sand through an hourglass, like hot blood through veins. We cannot stem the flow of holy grief but we can learn to endure it and even love it, let it break us open to more life and more laughter and more willingness to stand where we stand, feel what we feel, know what we know, even if it hurts and we long for escape, even if we want to die ourselves sometimes from so much life.

I am eternally grateful to grief and her shattering and her unplanned losses, for they have brought me kicking and screaming into a clear awareness of the one thing that cannot be lost.

Let us die into life, my love.

Let us die into life.

- Jeff Foster