When we feel grief over the loss of a person or a relationship, others often tell us to move past it. Sometimes we try to run away from it. But grieving is a process that we have to move through, not move around. It is like any other life transition.To find peace and acceptance, first we have to enter and stand in a place than can be painful and confusing. I know when I stand there, I can feel the pain expanding around my heart. And when I do that, rather than numb myself, I find it is the only way I can move forward. Otherwise, I am stuck feeling no pain but unable to feel joy.
 
“Your Grief is not a muddy puddle. You cannot jump over it.
Your Grief is not a riptide. It will not pull you under.
Your Grief is not a stepchild; you may not forget her. Your Grief is not a
challenge or a quest or even a compass.

Your Grief is the layer of leaves coating the forest floor; constantly underfoot,
cracking with the pressure exerted by your soles, wanting to become one
with the earth again.

Your Grief has a life cycle. It is incubated, it is born, it grows and learns to
speak and seems to have a mind belonging only to it. It doesn’t care whether
you are tired or meeting a deadline or falling in love. When it is hungry, you
must feed it.

What does Your Grief like to eat? It craves remembrance. Take your Grief to
the last body of water you sat by with your dead Beloved and cry cry cry.
Repeat her name, repeatedly. Chant it to the rhythm of your own heartbeat,
drop the pitch so low and speed up the rate so much until her name
is the buzzing of a hundred hives of angry bees despairing at the death of the
mortal world. …

Your Grief is a crying baby. A starving child. When it is not fed, the world
cannot roll along easily in its orbit. You can try to ignore it. Try to turn the
volume up on the dance hits that advocate for forgetting. Try to kiss pale eyes
goodnight and close them to seeing. But your Grief wants you to collect those
leaves from the forest floor, wants you to daily turn the compost bin with a
pitchfork, mixed with watermelon rinds and tea bags and coffee grounds,
wants you to know what season in your life it is so that you don’t get fed up
trying to grow wildflowers in an impoverished earth.”
-Afrose Fatima Ahmed