Excerpt from Grief is Love

Read this brief introduction to JJ Flowers’ examination of grief, Grief is Love.

Grief is a story of love.

It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The end is always heartbreaking; sometimes tragic and often as poignant and beautiful as a sunset. In the best stories, this is delivered with a previously unknown intensity of feeling.

Every love story ends in grief. It is the price we pay for it; for our love. We bought the ending the moment we fell in love.

Grief then becomes the reverberation of love’s music into the rest of our lives.

Stories of love are sacred. Grief is sacred. It is not a thing to “get through.” It is not a mere pause, and certainly not a “bump” on the otherwise happy road of your life. It is infinitely bigger than that.

Grief arrives as a teacher bearing gifts. It has things to show you. Grief, you will learn, changes as it transforms you one day to the next, one month to the next, one year to the next. It keeps shapeshifting, sometimes dramatically, as you learn its lessons, but . . . it will never go away.

Because your love is forever, grief is forever.

The first thing you need to know about your grief is that love created its every characteristic, especially its size and shape. Since no one else experienced your love story, this exclusivity means no one will ever know what you are going through. You might spend the rest of your life writing about it, painting pictures of it, singing songs about your love and its loss, and still, no one can know your love in the same way you do.

You are walking alone on your grief’s path.

This book is my attempt to show up, take your hand, and say, “Come this way, look there, see the light?”

Buy the book here: https://lanternpm.org/books/grief-is-love/