For almost a year, I sat with strangers through their final days, and I discovered that in comforting other people’s endings, I found some quiet comfort for my own loss, as though the love I could no longer give my mother could be spent, instead, on these forgotten souls who needed it just as much.
It did not fix my grief.
But it gave it somewhere to go.
I have thought a great deal, since, about that phrase, somewhere to go, because it turned out to be the secret of everything that followed, though I did not understand it at the time.
Grief is love with nowhere to land.
That is what no one tells you when someone you love dies: that the love does not die with them, that it goes on existing, powerful and undiminished, but that the person it was meant for is gone, and so it has nowhere to go, and it turns, dammed up inside you, into pain.
