Colin your piece was apt and creates an opening for a dialog on grief.

I remember being in my early 20s when my Aunt died (possibly a suicide in a very Catholic family). When I was informed I went into my bedroom and cried for 45 minutes. When I emerged my parents were rigid and seemed to regard me with disdain and/or fear.

In my 30s a couple had a child that survived 6 weeks after he was born. Then he passed. At the memorial service a professional mourner, a black woman from Oakland, California wailed and wailed — touching the grief not just of the loss of this special child but of all the loss of all the people in the room. It was a transformative experience.

Grief and love are inexorably bound. We cannot feel and/or express grief unless we allow ourselves to remember and feel the love that connected us to that person that died. Malidoma Somé, an African Shaman and author, called grief the lost common emotion felt by humans. Grief can help us cleanse from painful past memories allow a new space for joy to enter. Whether grief is personally connected with someone we know or for others who have befallen a tragedy grief still touches us when our hearts are open. That doesn’t mean we forget our losses, it just means we deal with grief, sit with it, soften our hearts towards ourselves let expressions of grief flow and then maybe an inkling of relief and/or love enters and we carry on. Eventually we come to a new way of thinking and being with grief so we are not slaves to it.

Denial of grief in terms of revenge and the rage and angry that comes with it only manufactures grief for somebody else. It does not resolve the loss it only serves us to be emotionally stuck or regressed in past memories that coat us in the present. Anger, rage and hatred keep love and compassion out of our lives and force us to be isolated lonely and perhaps addicted to power, greed and / or substances.

My mother ( and my father too — to a lesser unspoken degree) shamed me for my expressions of grief. It took me years to realize that to allow myself to feel vulnerable and emote was the brave stance. Unconsciously my mother and sister projected they’re feelings of grief and loss onto me and I expressed it for them. After I realized that was happening it was easier for me to forgive them for shaming me.