Grief is Love You Can No Longer Give

Grief is love you can no longer give. I read this quote the other day and it affected me so deeply after a year of fear and loss. It gave me some comfort and I hope it will do the same for you.

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot give. The more you love someone, the more you grieve. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes and in that part of your chest that gets empty and hollow feeling. The happiness of love turns to sadness when unspent. Grief is just love with no place to go.” – Jamie Anderson

Death and Grief

When someone you love dies, the sadness and the grief are truly about love. I know that when I lost my grandmother, knowing I wouldn’t hear her voice or receive one of her letters again in my lifetime, was heartbreaking. I could no longer give her my love, and instead, I only had my memories. Mourning the permanent loss of a loved one takes a deep acceptance and a new reality.

Divorce and Grief

What about when you experience grief from a divorce or a separation from those you have loved? The challenge is that love cannot simply be turned on and off. What sometimes hurts the most, is the forced reality that the person you are now separated from didn’t truly love the way you thought they did. Maybe they didn’t love you the way you deserved to be loved. Divorce and grief are also about the loss of your identity and mourning the loss of your identity.

Capacity for Love

If there’s one thing I’ve learned during my lifetime, and believe me, I’m still learning, it is that each person has a different capacity for love. Sometimes I feel like such a weirdo, simply because I feel things more deeply than so many people around me. I just have to accept this truth and focus on what’s truly important in life; my husband, my children, and the other weirdos who want the world to be a better place.

So sometimes I have to grieve and then I get up and love again. I hope you do the same. In midlife, we face a lot of love and a lot of grief with the loss of our parents, our roles as parents, and our changing identity as we enter into retirement. Find a way to mourn but to also rise back up to love this little life. Grief is the price we pay for love.