You don’t have to walk away from your dead

You don’t have to walk away from your dead!

—

The idea used to be that a healthy grieving process ended in detachment.  Freud called it decathexis, the removal of emotional and mental energy.  Some people call it by other names, like:

Moving on

Getting over it 

Letting go

And the most popular term: Closure

—

The goal of grief is NOT closure.  In fact, I think closure makes part of us die.

—

I don’t think dead and alive are mutually exclusive.  I don’t think it’s either dead or alive.  For most of us, it’s both.  There’s very real ways that the dead are alive and there’s very real ways that the living are dead.  It’s a mixed reality that fluctuates through your journey.

—

Moving on from the people we really love — dead or alive — creates an emptiness, a loneliness, a dead space.  It can make the living partially dead.  So that closure rarely brings health and peace, but added grief and pain . . . emptiness.  Because if closure is the goal, you’re asked to not just bury your loved one once, you’re asked to bury them twice.

—

I think if we allow our love to stay, if we keep that love open and alive, there’s a sense that we will never fully lose them.  Because even though they’re dead, their love can remain alive in you.