What Grief Has Taught Me About Love

Some losses are so profound that we think we can barely stand them. But then moment by moment, day by day, we carry on until we see, maybe months or years later, that we have borne that loss—and, in all likelihood, been both softened and strengthened as a result.

I’ve been thinking lately about the greatest personal loss I’ve experienced to date, wondering if it taught me anything that could be helpful now, as all of us, to one degree or another, grapple with loss.

It occurred six and a half years ago. I was standing at my mother’s bedside in an ICU unit, holding her hand and seeing out of the corner of my eye the line on the heart monitor gradually flatten until it became straight and unmoving. The nurse reached across my mother’s chest, quietly turned it off and respectfully left the room.

My brother had said a few years before that he wasn’t sure I would be ready for my mother’s passing. I knew that was true; there was no way to be ready for it. Ours was one of those exceptionally great mother-daughter relationships, something like what Cheryl Strayed wrote about in Wild, minus the drugs and reckless sex.

Life would always be a little dimmer without my mother in it, I said at her funeral. And, I still experience that as true. But life also keeps surprising me.

On the second anniversary of her death, I went to a beach at dusk. The beach was our favorite place to go. We walked many of them together, loving the smell of the salt water in the air, the wind on our faces, the feeling of the sand beneath our feet, the sense of power in an ocean as far as the eye could see.

I sat alone on the cool sand amid the beach grass, the ocean in front of me, trees behind and stars beginning to come out overhead. I thought about her in that way that can make you feel like you are somehow with someone who has passed on.

Then suddenly, in some mysterious way I can no longer fully recall, I had the sense that her spirit was everywhere—across the sky, in the trees, in my body, in every atom in every single place in this vast universe.

This led to the big thing loss has taught me about love.

In the book, Trainings in Compassion, Zen teacher Norman Fischer describes two kinds of love: relative love and absolute love. Relative love, he writes, is what we humans engage in when we care for each other in the myriad and beautiful ways we do. I think of it as personal love—the love I had for my mother and she for me. The love doctors, nurses and all the world’s caretakers are demonstrating so heroically now.

Absolute love, in contrast, goes beyond the personal. As Fischer describes it, it is a vision of life as love itself—a kind of love in which “there can be no loss, because this love is so big it includes everything—even absence—so that nothing can ever be lost.” This is what I had a glimpse of when I sensed my mother’s spirit—that is, the love she represented—everywhere. I also see it in the knowing, even in a pandemic, that life is good.

So, the big thing loss has taught me about love is that there is an even greater love than whatever it is we may have lost. This in no way diminishes our loss. But it suggests there is a larger container for it all: the love, the loss, the whole kit and caboodle as my mother might have said.

But the practical part of Fischer’s teaching that has helped me the most is that personal love and absolute love are interdependent. They need each other. After all, a sense of absolute love—without our own real-world efforts to love—would be a mere abstraction.

And, on the flip side, relying on our own personal love without some recognition that love exists as a force beyond us might make daunting moments like this one feel unbearable.

But taken together? We can rest in doing our best and take refuge in what is bigger than us. And, who knows? Maybe the losses we are experiencing now might help us not only grow stronger and softer together but also more able to love.