Grief Dares Us to Love Once More

"Grief dares us to love once more." ~ Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow.

THIS.  This sort of screamed at me out of this book.  This is what grief does.  It challenges (dares) us to go on, to continue to love while knowing so deeply the pain of loss.  We can choose to stop loving, or we can accept grief's dare.  

But there are days when you are in the throes of grief when loving feels terrifying.  When you are walking a constant tightrope of continuing to live and love and walking through the hot coals of grief.  Sometimes one foot is on both sides.  A soul split.  A heart both filled with love and breaking from loss.  It is an almost constant dichotomy.  

This one sentence screamed to me because this is my daily challenge right now.  It is why my anxiety is at the highest it's been in at least a decade.  It's why my heart skips beats now and then.  It's why sleep is elusive. It's why a bad cold in my kid can ramp me up to extreme levels of concern.  Because I know how fragile life is.  I know how one day can change everything.

And grief dares me to keep going.  To keep believing in the miracle of every day.  To keep loving through grief.  

And some days (and lots of nights), it's terrifyingly hard not to let grief win.  To not let the pain win and take over.  But grief and I have been here before.  I have a love/hate relationship with it.  

And I know that this is the deepest of grief journeys.  Choosing, every day, to love again.