Grief is deeply personal, but mourning is collective. Mourning is processing the grief with the help of others, mirroring your emotion in a collective catharsis, yet grief and sorrow is what is left when the doors close and you’re alone with your thoughts and feelings. Grief is as deep as it is gentle. It cuts right down to the center of self, leaving wreckage and confusion, loss, disjointedness, feeling of being left as less after the event has transpired.

Grief is deeply personal and subjective because it doesn’t obey the social rules. Some things we can never know and grief is not something to be analyzed and dragged into the light. It makes the griever far too fragile while still unprocessed to do so. Grief comes about because a sense of incompleteness in ourselves after something was lost. It doesn’t matter how big or small the event is to the outside world, it can come from a big socially accepted reason as losing a loved one – this is a grief everybody understand and intuitively as social animals we know to be soft with the grieving – but it can also come as s loss of any number of things and is strictly defined by the value they had to you. It can be that the neighbors cut down the tree and the best part of your mornings your whole life was waking up and looking at it feeling peace. It could be the loss of a kitten you tried to save, seeing your kids growing up and understanding they are too big now to ever crawl into bed with you again, it can be seeing people growing old, losing a job you loved, losing money, the subtle fading of a dream, losing a love that lasted a month but seemed like a lifetime…

It will eventually go away, subside or will just constantly stay as a reminder, an almost pleasant hum of melancholy that serves you more than it hurts you by giving texture and meaning to other things. Grieve and mourn the things and be happy you have the chance to do so. These feelings carry a gentleness within them, letting you know you’re still opened, you still let things in, you still allow life to touch you and haven’t been hardened by all it threw at you. Grieving is a warm quiet understanding of interconnectedness of things, you are not lessened by the loss, but have been given a chance to say thank you for having had the privilege of this experience for a while. You’re the lucky ones – you’ve learnt to love and be loved.