right grief

There is no love without grief.

I think maybe there is such a thing as the right grief, though.

The rightest grief I’ve ever felt was when my husband’s grandmother died: after a long and full life, she died in her sleep, having seen all the people who loved her by her side within the past day, knowing they were there to comfort each other. And they did that, mourned and comforted at once, and though the loss of someone like her was a lot to mourn, there was a lot to comfort with. It was mostly like that when my own grandparents died, too.

It’s never that right when anyone dies too young or too painfully. There’s too much to rail at the universe about. But still, when my uncle died a lot of it was right grief. I rage angainst cancer, but it happens. He died knowing, and with us knowing, that he’d done all he could to fight it, and that he’d had the best possible care – at least, the best that’s possible in this time with the little that’s known so far about a particularly rare and vicious cancer. When I read about the current US healthcare arguments, that’s what I think about now – I want other people in my country to know, when someone they love dies, that they died because of disease and not because of lack of care.

Someone I know is mourning the death of a baby in her family now. That’s always a heartwound – one of the best things about living *now* is being able to expect to see your children grow up, instead of expecting that a few out of every family won’t. We’ve got shock added to grief on the occasions when one doesn’t. But babies are frail, and sometimes the worst things happen. I haven’t been through it so I don’t know how hard it is or what helps. But I hope there’s some of that consolation of right grief, at least in time, in knowing that the baby spent her short life with people who loved her, who did their best for her, who would have given their own hearts to preserve her. (Probably not much much comfort right away, though.)

(NB: by “right grief”, I think I mostly mean the grief that is the inevitable other side of love, uncomplicated by too much guilt or too many if-onlys. I don’t mean “right” as in dictating what anyone ought to feel, ever. That would be obnoxious and presumptuous.)