![\"Robin](\"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/GriefTreesPost-686x1024.jpg\" "\\"What")
After life, as I knew it, got shot to the stars, grief charred me from the inside out. There were good days and bad days. I sometimes forgot my sadness. Briefly. Other times, for days, I\u2019d be cranky and complain, \u201cI can\u2019t do this. I hate this. This is too hard.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCan we talk in terms of solutions rather than problems?\u201d a wise friend asked, when she saw me struggling on a bad day. Then she said, \u201cKeep coming back to what you love,\u201d and I almost cried. Because to me, that meant coming back to my daughter who died. Everyone else was telling me, \u201cIt\u2019s time to move on.\u201d If grief was something to \u201cget over\u201d or \u201cget through,\u201d I was failing miserably. So to hear that I could come back, was to understand that there is no time limit on mourning the loss of a loved one. It allowed me to slowly get used to my shaken world. It allowed that my grieving might never be completely done.<\/p>\n
Can we think of grief as something more than pain and suffering? It\u2019s been more gently defined as love\u2019s unwillingness to let go<\/a>, the price of love, or love with nowhere to go. Holding tight<\/a> to our loved one\u2019s memory and spirit, when we grieve we are expressing our love.<\/p>\n Grief is also the slow redefining of our relationship with the one we love who died. It is the effort to rebuild around the giant hole they leave in our lives. We can choose to weave the emotional bond, the memory, their values and voice into a new way of carrying them with us.<\/p>\n