When the Grief Hits

When my grief for L hits, it’s always different.

Sometimes it’s fleeting.

Sometimes it’s this softness that feels like a pause in my day… a moment where I can acknowledge how much she means to me and still keep moving. And then there are days like today, when I wake up crying for hours because the part of me that misses her is just more active.

It hurts, but it’s not the kind of pain that makes me want to hide.

It’s the kind of pain that reminds me how much she matters to me. How much she helped me. How she was the first person in my life to ever love me the way she did.

And don’t mistake the word “love” for anything inappropriate.

I loved and still do love her deeply, both in her role as my therapist and as a human being. The way she showed up in the room showed who she was. Her values. The way she saw the world. At least it felt authentic to me.

But my point is, she knew how I felt.

And she made it clear she cared, but in a very boundaried way.

When I use the word love to describe what I felt from her (not my feelings for her) I mean the care I felt. The feeling of being understood, sometimes more so than I understood myself. The feeling of being seen. The feeling of being held emotionally.

I have never felt grief like this.

Not this deep.

Not this long.

This is my first experience of loss that hits this hard and stays.

Part of my time with her was a huge lesson: fear can take away from the beauty of care and love in the moment. It’s not worth losing that presence. I wish I had known that earlier, but I’m glad I was able to experience her care and learn that even when I don’t feel worthy, even when I don’t feel good enough, I can still accept love as someone else’s truth.

I know I’ve probably said all of this before.

I think part of my grief is replaying the lessons.

Replaying the care I felt.

Letting myself feel the love in my heart, the respect I have for her, the admiration.

Letting myself feel how much it all mattered… and still does, and hoping I can find something like that in the people in my life now.

She set the bar for how love should show up in my life.

Authors note:

I found myself starting to over-explain so that I wouldn’t be misunderstood. When I write about love… about care… I automatically think of my wife. How she has always loved and cared about me. And I think of people reading this and thinking that this means I’ve never felt loved by my wife or cared for and that’s not the case.

This is just different, and I can’t explain that to people who have never felt the difference before. It’s just something you’ve either experienced or you haven’t.

Also, in case the frog photo feels random, it’s not. It’s one of those tiny details about her that stayed with me. She was fascinated by them. Using this image felt like a small way of putting a piece of her in this post.