There is a way of thinking about grief that changed how many people relate to it. It goes like this: grief is not the opposite of love. Grief is love. It is the love that was going to that person, that has been going to that person, and that now has nowhere to go. It keeps moving in the direction of someone who is no longer there to receive it.
This reframes the pain of grief from something to be overcome into something that makes a different kind of sense. You are not suffering because something is wrong with you. You are suffering because you loved, and love does not stop just because the person is gone.
This understanding can make the grief feel less like an affliction and more like — a continuation. The grief is proof of the relationship. It is the inverse of the joy the person brought. The bigger the love, the bigger the grief. And viewed this way, the grief becomes something to be honored rather than something to be fixed.
This does not make grief easier to endure. The pain is still real. The absence is still devastating. But it gives the pain a context that can make it feel less like it is destroying you and more like it is expressing something true about who you are and who they were to you.
The love has to go somewhere. Over time, many people find ways to redirect it — into memory, into practice, into legacy. They do something in honor of the person they lost. They carry forward something that mattered to them. They maintain the relationship in a new form — not pretending the person is still alive, but acknowledging that love, once given, does not simply evaporate.
You can love someone who is gone. The relationship changes form, but it does not end. And the grief — however long it lasts, however heavy it gets — is one of the truest expressions of that love. You do not grieve what did not matter. You grieve what you could not bear to lose. And that is its own kind of testament.