Make Sure You’re Really Grieving

““Humans are instinctively averse to pain, conditioned instead to solve and strengthen and maximize, to inure ourselves to hurt. The idea of willingly spending some indeterminate amount of time feeling bad is unthinkable. But that was how I understood his counsel: feel bad. A bad thing happened, and it is reasonable to feel bad. Thrashing against it was both exhausting and fruitless. The experience reminded me of the woven bamboo finger traps I played with as a kid—the harder you tried to free your hands, the tighter and more frightening the whole thing got. To feel better, I had to find a way to value and nurture my grief.””