On grief, gratitude, and the law of conservation of energy

Grief is just love in a heavy coat.

There has been nothing so beautifully transformative in my life as grief. In 2021, the wonderful man I am lucky enough to call my grandfather passed away after a years-long battle with a brutal cancer that ate away at his body, but never at his spirit. 

To watch somebody that you love die over a long period of time is very, very strange. Over the course of his illness, my family and I were grieving a person who was still alive. We grieved the loss of his health, the sound of his full-chested laugh. I can recall that grief began to dig its vicious claws into me when I realized that my cousins and I would never jump into leaves that he raked into a pile for us again, and then again when I realized that he would never meet my children. To them, he would be a collection of photographs and stories. This is what breaks my heart the most—that so many people will never experience the joy of his presence. I feel fortunate to have been near him at all, but to be loved by him? What an immense privilege.

To say that I was crushed by his death would be an understatement—I was nothing short of debilitated. I was consumed by a sadness that was larger than I was. How could the world keep spinning when its best occupant was gone? I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of a life without him in it. 

In the depths of my grief, everything reminded me of my grandfather, and I was actively seeking out distractions from this. I got my first job as a waitress at an Italian restaurant, which was incredibly healing for me, and I began dating my now ex-boyfriend, which was not—I was drawn to him because he was exactly the kind of man that Lana Del Rey sings about: a classically handsome, captivatingly smart, and slightly arrogant man who disappoints a woman he doesn’t deserve time and time again. 

But I digress! While our relationship didn’t work out, he did introduce me to the greatest book ever written, Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom, which made me fall apart at the seams, and then stitched me right back up again. If you haven’t read it, you absolutely should. It’s a memoir that recounts a series of visits Albom made to his dying professor, Morrie Schwartz. Morrie, from beyond the grave, offers readers a poignant perspective on grief, death, and love that only a dying man could: “As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on–in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here…Death ends a life, not a relationship.” 

In spite of his faults, I probably owe my ex-boyfriend a kidney for recommending this book to me, because this sentiment became the central point of my life. I also found a strange comfort in the law of conservation of energy, which is the principle that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted. In other words, nothing (hence, nobody) is ever really gone–just elsewhere. 

Of course I had struggled to imagine a life without my grandfather in it—there was no life without my grandfather in it.

I became very mindful not to take the universe around me for granted, because it was the one thing that kept my grandfather and I connected. Every day, I searched for the small pieces of him that remained. His unbreakable spirit was in the hallways of my high school (he was so proud to have been in their first graduating class, and he was even prouder that I was following in his footsteps). His full voice was in the distant whistle of a train and in Bob Seger songs (“Hi, honey!”). His blood was coursing through the veins of my family members, and I could see his features on my mother’s face. I could hear his laugh when I opened a package of Lifesaver gummies or a can of Coke, and I could feel his calloused hand in mine when I saw a man on a purple motorcycle. I think this is the most beautiful part of grief—that you can find little pieces of the person you lost anywhere that you look for them, and it can give you a renewed sense of gratitude for things that were once mundane.

Once I adopted this mindset, every passing moment became holy. I was frequently reminding myself to be present, to breathe deeply, to drink in the vibrancy of the universe before me, to feel everything to its fullest extent. This is how I made peace with my sadness: I was lucky to have a broken heart, I decided, because at the very least, it was proof that I had a heart. What a privilege it is to have loved somebody so much that their absence cuts me so deeply. I once read that grief is just love in a heavy coat.

Of course I miss my grandfather every day. I wish that I could have seen the pride in his eyes as I accepted my high school diploma from his alma mater. I wish that I could have called him when I got into college like I did when I got my driver’s license. He would have been so proud. I wish that he could have watched his grandchildren grow up and I wish I could tell him how lucky I still feel to be his granddaughter. I wish that I could feel his arms around me one more time—just five more minutes. I would do anything. I wish that you were reading about how wonderful he is instead of how wonderful he was, but either way, you are reading about somebody wonderful.

Loss is a painful but necessary part of a beautiful life. This isn’t what anybody who is grieving wants to hear, but it’s true. In fact, it’s perhaps the most important thing that I’ve learned—that you don't have to be happy about something in order to be grateful for it. I’m endlessly grateful for the darkness of the trenches that my grief threw me into, because it taught me to graciously embrace any sliver of light.

I feel lucky.

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Thank you for reading You Get What You Need ♡