It's Supposed to Be Painful

“I don’t know why I felt like this was a revelation, but after a few months, I suddenly realized that part of my suffering was frustration that I wasn’t already over it. It’s supposed to hurt. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that you should be grateful to have loved someone so much that it hurts so horrifically… but accepting the pain is a lot more palatable than white knuckling it. I liked this quote from Katherine Shear, the founder and director of the Center for Prolonged Grief, at Columbia University’s School of Social Work: “The problem people have is not in the experience of grief itself. The problem is how to learn to accept the unthinkable.””