The Price We Pay

I read somewhere and I often think that a common sentiment about grief is that "grief is the price we pay for love." And I used to believe that whole-heartedly... maybe up until just a few moments ago. But as I was meditating just now on what I need to let go of this month (mostly my need to control everything), I started thinking about my brother again. And it came to me that grief isn't the price we pay for love - grief IS love. 

Grief is the feeling in our body when we lose someone we love - yes - but it's also the way our love can transform when we feel that we have lost something we have loved. But the thing is, we never really lose that love, that love simply transforms. 

I have often over the last few years felt like I should be letting go of my grief over my brother; as if there was some magical moment in which I would no longer feel this intense loss. Moreover, I have felt an internal refusal to let go of that grief. A sense that if I let go of that grief that I am, in essence, letting go of my brother. That I am giving up, giving into that he died and that is the end of his story. But that isn't the end. He will always live on through my memories of him. He will always live on through the brotherly love he showed me. He will always live on because there is a part of me that believes his spirit is with me in some form (because it is).

And so what I've just realized is that my grief for him isn't want I need to let go of at all. What I need to let go of is the need to control how that grief is transforming - my love will never fade, and in a sense, neither will my grief. But that grief is transmuting into something else; a new form of love. That grief, over time, is slowly transforming into remembrance, into fondness, into the kind of love that endures through holding dearly everything my brother gave me to me throughout my life - put simply, love. The love of a brother, the love of an attempted mentor, a father figure (in some ways). The love of a deeply bonded sibling who got to know me over and over as I grew from a child, to a teenager, and into an adult.

I think for so long I've been so afraid to accept his passing because I was afraid that in that acceptance I would lose something. I hadn't identified what that something was. But I can't operate from a place of fear any longer - it's hurting me physically and mentally to keep doing this to myself. And my brother wouldn't have wanted that. And while I can't say I'm quite to that "acceptance" phase of grief yet, I can say that I slowly seeing in real time where that grief is transforming into something so beautiful - into the spirit of love and remembrance. Into the spirit of gratitude. Into the spirit of the collective.

So today, I am not letting go of my brother or the grief from his death. I am letting go of my need to control or hold on to the cycle of keeping my grief in the same place. The cycle of keeping myself in the same place. I am not letting my brother go, I am letting go of the fear and control that I have been clutching so tightly... because not only does it no longer serve me, but because I no longer need it. Only the the love remains, and that is more powerful than anything I could have ever imagined.