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A shadow of grief has always been cast over my life. Like volcanic ash, it choked out my sky, entombed any civil bodies in my identity, made the land of my living vision barren and inhospitable. This blanket of grief has frozen generations of my family -- from my grandmother's passing to my father leaving his family behind to emigrate, or from my mother's lifelong isolation and the loss of her own language among her only family. Time has stopped for my family. Loss has caked over our eyes and made us blind to love, compassion or friendship. Grief has hardened our hearts, and we betray ourselves for our inability to be vulnerable or to laugh freely.
Lately, I've been learning what it is to laugh freely. Out loud, without covering your teeth in shame because you think they're ugly. Openly, not hating yourself for sounding like you're choking on air because in your upbringing you learned laughter not as celebration or release, but as a tool for control. I've been learning laughter can be motivated by happiness, instead of fear. Or, relaxedness, instead of nervousness, anxiety, or tension. I've been learning laughter can lift up our hearts, and doesn't need to be used as an apology or tool for de-escalation. I do not laugh freely; it is hard to see laughter as anything other than strident pain and self-betrayal. Though it's been two years of trying to learn laughter as something happy, I am still barely beginning to see it in healthy ways; I have yet to freely practice laughter at all.
Grief is in the way. Always, I blame myself for my lack of advancement. I know what I want, what I need, what is healthy for me -- but, when it comes time to do the thing I must do, I just stall. I stare at it. I freeze. I cannot be bothered to move, to act. What for? My strength is drained. I'm tired. Courage is irrelevant -- there is no threat or enemy before me. Yet, I am paralyzed by fear; I am defeated.
This is not the way to treat a grieving heart. Soothe it with song. Hold it. Tell it that it's cherished. Let it know it has been loved, and even if the mortal vessels that have expressed love for it have shrugged off, and even if that love has been soured or betrayed by deceit or abandonment, love itself is always true and always there.
Even if you're sure they lied when they said "I love you" or "I'll be there for you" it doesn't matter. We could never tell the truth if we have the ambition of knowing our own hearts, our wills, or our wants -- those parts of us are not only out of our vision, they are uncontrollable by our anxious wills. Like the tides, they carry us, but are beyond our comprehension.
When we say "I love you" or "I'll never leave you" it's not a promise nor an expression of truth or facticity -- nothing ever holds still long enough for truth to work like that. It is a song, a poem, a transient expression of something exuberant and intractible but effervescent -- gone before the moment it falls on our ears, and long gone by the time it has traversed our mind, imagination, memories, and inclinations to arrive at our hearts (if we ever allow the expression of love to make it that far). No, none of that matters now. It's gone, divorced by time and history from all prescient reality. Love itself is undying, but the love we grieve is dead already.
That's hard to wrap our heads around. Hastily, we think "this lover has left me; my life is devoid of love" while our friends or parents whom we haven't spoken to in weeks or months love us very much, and we just don't see it. Loss of love or absence of love leads us to forget the love that holds us in relation with the world.
Blanchot tells us that we forget because we are trying to hold on to something that is already gone. A grieving heart does not need wrath or hatred. Also, forgiveness is likely too great an ambition for it; but perhaps the path to forgiveness is through this fleeting thought: "I blamed you for the loss I felt. I overwrote love with anger. The thought of you once brought love, but now it just kicks up a storm of grief, envy, anger, vengeance... None of that mattes now. The blame game of who was wrong, or how what I did was wrong -- it doesn't matter now. Now, all that can save us is the memory of love, and its absolution for a future open to its blooming anew."
Grief is the absence of love. It hurts because we're trying to hold on to something we have always cherished, and what we get for our efforts to hold on -- to remember love -- is an unending reminder that we have nothing in our hands. This thought leads us to think there is nothing in our hearts, in our history. And so, memories rewrite themselves; we are made unreliable narrators of our own lives -- unreliable archivists in a life where archives are impossible because nothing keeps, nothing holds, nothing guards, and nothing stays, as everything is transient, in flux, in motion. Living. Dying. Often, gone already.
What a grieving heart needs is to forget. Indeed, the heart grieves because it senses itself having forgotten love itself. Anger is natural, as is blame and the will for retribution -- but that's not what a grieving heart needs.
It's hard to find the strength to live under such a heavy burden of grief. I am learning we cannot healthily handle hard situations if we cannot freely laugh about them. To laugh freely, we must forget our sorrows; our grief must die, as did the love our grieving mourns. By freely laughing, we -- in an embodied manner -- accept that our grief and the superstructure of relation, memory, and loss it serves as our anchor to has already died and gone on. Through this, we can -- for a moment -- be open to the future/present and find love anew. For, the love never left us. Love is not a promise, nor a gift one person can give to any one of us -- love sounds through us all. Love binds us together under relation. The grief will come again; that's why we can so easily say our goodbyes to our own grief, if we just let go of what has already gone. We will always remember, and remember again, love long gone. To be open to love's return, we must forget the myths of lost love that we hold on to through our grief, in a moment, to meet love as it presents itself in what's before us.