A few weeks ago I was watching a show on Netflix. In the scene, two people were talking about their experiences of losing people close to them and one of them said, “When it happened, my therapist told me that grief never gets smaller, so we have to get bigger.”
This has reverberated through me ever since I heard it.
It feels like we’re in a time of soul crushing loss. There are so many folks in my personal and professional life that are dealing with tremendous amounts of grief. Grieving the deaths of beloveds (in human and animal form), losing employment, experiencing health declines, facing housing insecurity, you name it.
At this point in my life, I’m starting to understand on a much deeper level that loss is an absolute guarantee when it comes to this whole human thing. The longer we live, the more we’ll lose. And with loss, comes contraction. We often recoil into ourselves and our world gets smaller. This contraction is normal and necessary. But we often forget that expansion naturally comes after the contraction.
This is the natural rhythm to life. Everything contracts and expands. Our breath. Our heartbeat. The waves in the ocean. The seasons.
When the contraction comes and the suffering is deafening, it’s almost unfathomable to imagine anything that can come next. Our perspective contracts along with our heart and time seems to freeze. In those moments, the only thing to anchor to is our breath. It’s the simplest, yet most elegant reminder that the expansion will come.
Yes, you’ll be changed from this grief. You’ll be a different version of yourself from this point forward. But what if this new version can create more freely, move through the world with greater ease, connect more fully and love deeper? Perhaps this is, dare I say, the gift of grief. It offers us the possibility of an expansion that we couldn’t have imagined without an extraordinary circumstance.
