Love and grief are two sides of a many-sided coin.

I’m reading a book of stories about love, and the thing that’s getting me is how most of the stories are also about loss. People are asked for a story about love and they talk about grief.

It’s a many-sided coin, and I have no idea how many sides it has, but I think grief and love are two of them.

What I’m learning is that we grieve the things we love - sometimes even before they’re gone - and maybe it’s love that gets us through the grief.

It’s scary, to love, knowing we’ll eventually lose the things we love. It’s scary to love in this culture, where we don’t do grief very well. It’s scary to love, knowing that when we lose the things we love, we will be alone with that emptiness.

Imagine if, when someone is grieving, we collectively knew what to do. Imagine if we had the kind of culture who gathered round grief, made space for it, gave time to it. Imagine if we had the kind of culture that wasn’t afraid of it. Imagine if grief was acknowledged and shared. Imagine if we knew how to move with grief, to move it through our bodies and our hearts, and to let it change us, soften us, open us into love again.

Imagine if you lost something you loved, and the people around you leaned in, and loved you so fiercely that even though your path through grief is yours alone to walk, you were never lonely while you walked it. Imagine if you were loved so fiercely in your grieving that there was no way to tell the difference between grief and love. That many sided coin spinning so fast that all the sides look the same.

Imagine how brave we could be with our loving, knowing that our eventual loss would be met and surrounded with arms and hands and hearts, holding us through it.

Imagine that.