FALLING IN LOVE WITH GRIEF
October 8, 2026
Grief and I had known each other off and on for many years. First time I met grief up close and personal was when I was quite the young woman and my Mom, who happened to be my best friend, contracted breast cancer at 41 years of age and at 43 years old she died leaving 12 children of which I was the oldest daughter. I ran away from grief at that time and did a pretty good job of it. I wanted nothing to do with actually too much of anything surrounding feelings in my life. I had to be engaged as I did have babies of my own at the time and siblings as well to care for so I ignored grief as much as possible, doing everything I could to keep it away from me.
As life went on, I ran into grief again. This time it was when one of my beautiful sisters tragically died way too young and again, I didn’t want to talk to grief. I realized I was getting pretty good at hiding from all feelings putting them in a room inside my mind and locking the door. I was just too busy.
Years later when my sweet younger brother died, something started to happen and I knew I had to at least shake hands with grief. I had done a lot of spiritual work and therapy and I wanted to open the door to good feelings. I did not want to be friends, however, I had to accept that in order for me to live my life in any kind of real way I would have to open up to all my feelings and let grief be part of them by understanding grief is an emotion wanting to have a seat at the table.
So, how did I end up in a love affair with grief? It all started 9 years ago, actually the 9-year mark is TODAY, October 8th. This is when grief and I had the most up close and personal encounter I have ever or will ever have with grief. In fact, I had no room for anything other than raw and vulnerable grief.
On October 8, 2017 at around 7:00 PM there was a knock on my door. There were several loved ones standing on my porch looking at me with a look of terror on their faces I had never seen before. And that is when those four words were spoken that I will never ever ever forget. “Michael didn’t make it”. What? What does that mean? Michael didn’t make it? Was he lost? Was he in a shelter somewhere? No! Michael, my beautiful son, who had just gone up to visit family, saying goodbye like he always did, by knocking on my door in the middle of the night, had only been gone for a day and a half. Going up to Northern California to visit family. This is when a wildfire, the most devastating at that time in the history of California, had taken along with another 43 people and thousands of acres of land, my boy.
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know how to be. I was frozen in my consciousness, frozen in my ability to even make sense of what was happening. To accept that my beautiful son Michael was burned alive in a wildfire.
And there was grief one more time. This time grief clung to me and refused to leave my side every minute of every day. 24 hours a day for months, grief was my companion. When I went to the grocery store and down the aisle where I knew Michael’s cereal was or the grapes were on sale or his favorite creamer was there, so was grief. I remember how many times I had to leave the grocery store because of grief taking me over and there was no way I could even finish shopping.
And as the minutes and the hours and the weeks and the months and years have gone by and realizing that in order for me to have a full life, not one that was being consumed by the sadness and the sorrow and the tears and the anger that his death produced, I had to first, become friends with grief and this is when I fell in love.
How I did that was to look through the memories of the wonderful times that I had with my son Michael. What we shared throughout the years that I had with him. And I took those memories and made them beautiful and powerful and they became my love affair with grief.
Grief and I are still partners and I’m sure will always be and yet it is a different kind of relationship. I have come to understand grief and just like any love affair there are times when I am angry at grief, there are times when I want to break up with grief, and then there are the times that I know why I love grief. And so, I will continue my love affair and know that Michael would want me to find the love in who he was rather than what happened when he died.
