Is Grief Our Highest Connection To The Divine?
For me, unquestionably.
“For the privilege of loving you, I will bear the burden of missing you.”
My dog - the love of my life, my soulmate, my best friend - passed away two years ago. Almost exactly two years ago in fact, September 8th, 2023. A date that will be seared into my brain until I’m lucky enough to follow.
I hesitated to even start that sentence with “my dog” because so many people will read that and immediately dismiss the depth of grief I have felt, and still feel, the past two years over Holly’s death.
But the clear, unshakeable, unmalleable truth is that grief, no matter the source, doesn’t measure itself by circumstance. Grief doesn’t announce itself solely for specified connections or certain species.
Grief is always, without fail, an expression of a transcendent love that has spilled beyond its vessel.
I was lucky enough to never experience any true grief until well into my adulthood. Two years before Holly passed away, my cat, Sonny, was called away to a different plane, and much more suddenly than Holly. Sonny leaving was my first real experience of visceral anguish, at 35 years of age.
Before that, I didn’t live close to or really know my grandparents or elder family members. Although I wish that had been different and although I did still feel the ache of loss when they left, I was young and loss was, at most, a concept. It hadn’t yet felt the sting of depth in adulthood and morphed into something insurmountable; something that reshapes the very essence of your being.
And it took growing into adulthood to appreciate that grief is the inevitable bedfellow of love - that attachment cannot exist in the absence of separation.
I’ve always believed that the highest form of love is the one that wants nothing in return. There’s something incredibly beautiful about a love that exists between two souls for no reason…simply because of some undefinable connection. Even before Holly, something in me always understood that the purest form of love was the one that was uncontained: a love that existed solely for the joy of it.
Maybe it’s true that society couldn’t exist in its current form without relationally-bound, tethered love and maybe there’s nothing wrong with a binding love, like family or romantic partnership, asking for structure. But there’s something raw, wild, and lawless about two souls that have nothing holding them together except a quiet, spiritual gravity: an unseen pull into each other’s orbit that can’t be explained. Two souls drawn to each other not out of need or duty, but because something in the universe whispers, “their soul belongs to you and yours to them.”
Maybe that’s where divinity lives.
And maybe, in the loss of one of those souls, that’s where the grief begins.
One doesn’t need to be a devout spiritualist to understand that no matter what you believe about divinity, the only divinity we have any proof of is that divinity that lives within us.
The characteristics we inevitably want to attribute to some omnipotent universal source energy aren’t truly visible anywhere but inside our own spirits and the spirits of those around us: tenderness, compassion, mercy, presence, protection, safety. Maybe we want to feel it from the God or Goddess we believe in, but we only have actual testimony of it from our fellow earth-bound creatures.
As such, the deliverance of the torment associated with being a soul trapped inside a human body isn’t in escape, but in recognition - the clear reflection of true divinity mirrored in those we love.
The benediction, then, is the love itself. Not what it can do for us. Not what it can bring to us. Not what it can make of us.
What it becomes through us.
The communion, finally, is the exchange - the endless current of a truly selfless love moving between souls who recognize the divine in one another.
Grief, it has been said and will be said again, changes you. Grief is a fault line between the life you led before and the irretrievably altered life that will follow. The quiet divide between what was and what can never be again.
No one who has ever experienced grief will tell you that they ever became the same person behind it as they were before it. And most people who have experienced grief will tell you that they’re happier for it - that the demarcation is much-needed proof of something real.
The revelation, then, is that grief is the holiest thing we humans will ever feel - the emotion that brings us the closest to God: the soul’s proof that we can experience a love that is truly divine, because it wants nothing, asks nothing, even has nothing in return.
The object of the love has gone; the love itself will never. Grief reminds us we are capable of loving beyond reason, beyond form, beyond life.
What could be more sacred?
And perhaps the reason grief feels so unbearable is because it’s a glimpse of eternity: a puny human mind trying to comprehend infinity.
When I think of Holly now, and Sonny too, it’s true that I feel searing, molten, unmediated anguish at their absence. But it’s also true that in equal measure, I feel ineffable reverence.
Because if I can feel the depth, the ethereality, the sanctity of love so many years after they’ve gone, what more proof of divinity do I need?
