You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.
-Pablo Neruda
Loss can feel like someone has cut all the flowers off their stems and left an ugly, empty, reminder of what once was. It may feel as though nothing good will ever come into life again. However, the seasons of grief move on their and bring us to a springtime that rekindles possibility and hope. Whatever obstacles may develop before us, they are not strong enough to the prevent a time of rebirth from emerging.
You may even try to be the architect of your own obstacles, cutting away personal growth and beauty that blooms because you don’t think they arrive too soon…or perhaps you don’t believe you deserve them. Grief is not about being as miserable as possible for as long as possible. Grief is about acknowledging love and celebrating the beauty of a relationship lost from our physical lives. In the course of these realizations, we mature in our worldviews and in our emotional life.
Growth and beauty come when they will in the course of grief. They are natural and inevitable byproducts of the grief “spring,” a time of awakening and rebirth. Our sadness gives way to joy (perhaps bittersweet) and the sun of happiness warms us again. The emergence of beauty and warmth does not mean we have forgotten our lost loved one, only that we have passed into the next cycle of our grief, a place where we might hold the cherished memory of our loved one within us where it warms us with love.
