Grief Graffiti

I haven’t written here in a while. I’ve been working on my Instagram page (@grief.graffiti) and in the process have found more & more people sharing their stories. I will do a post of all the pages on grief I recommend soon as I know it will be a help & comfort, especially for those new in this club. But today I just wanted to share one of the poems I found.

I love this as it explains how useless all the platitudes are that well-meaning people say to the bereaved. Things like, “at least you had them as long as you did”, or “they’re in a better place”, “better to have this pain now than to have never had your loved one”, or “time heals all wounds”. Time doesn’t heal this kind of wound. Like an amputated limb we will always feel the missing part of us. And, like this poem says so well, maybe we just accept that love & sorrow will now forever be our closest companions. 

Let us agree for now that we will not say the breaking makes us stronger.

Or that it is better to have this pain than to have done without this love.

Let us promise we will not tell ourselves time will heal the wound,

when every day our waking opens it anew.

Perhaps for now it can be enough to simply marvel at the mystery of how a heart so broken can go on beating,

as if it were made for precisely this.

As if it knows the only cure for love is more of it.

As if it sees the heart’s sole remedy for breaking is to love still,

as if it trusts that its own persistent pulse is the rhythm of a blessing we cannot begin to fathom,

but will save us nonetheless.

~Jan Richardson