Grief and Love

Two sides of the same coin

I’m once again nursing some sort of cold. I’ve had a tendency to get colds pretty often since I started college a few years ago, something that has been a huge nuisance, leading to bouts of existentialism whenever I do get sick. This one’s pretty minor, but every time I find myself with a bit of congestion and malaise, my mind loves to become awfully melodramatic — thinking about how much I took my healthfulness for granted, how fragile the human body is, how dust is the inevitable conclusion to my saga and of those around me. How easily does the body lose its vitality! And how quickly!

We grow up in wonder and amazement, discovering so many things about the world worth loving: blowing dandelions and watching SpongeBob, running around at recess and hugging our parents, eating Gushers and being with each other. Through the ups and downs, the core experience of life is discovering love for new things and chasing them. We all reach towards what we desire, eating ice cream whenever we’re allowed, playing outside with our friends until the street lights come on and the sprinklers start spraying. Even grown, I keep falling head over heels in love with new trees, new people, new foods, anything that I can. 

But with mortality comes grief. With life comes grief. Where does the love go when we lose the things that we love? Even as it wanes, even as we forget it, it always persists. The stronger the love, the more it persists, still just as strong, but converted into grief. One of the most repeated quotes on the matter is by someone named Jamie Anderson:

Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.

It’s beautiful and true and comforting to know that grief’s enormous weight is worth something more than just pain. I wondered if Jamie Anderson was some psychologist or self-help author who had written this line in a book somewhere. In reality, this quote appeared in a post about her late mother in a now inactive blog. She seemed to be a soccer mom who wrote for herself.

If grief is love with no place to go, perhaps giving it a home is what is needed. Jamie Anderson was able to channel some of her grief into writing, lighting a path for others who would discover the same feeling that she fought through.

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One of the most earnest Radiohead songs is called “True Love Waits,” a fairly simply written love song, featuring loving and nearly devotional lyrics like “I’ll drown my beliefs/To have your babies/I’ll dress like your niece/And wash your swollen feet.” Radiohead’s frontman Thom Yorke wrote the song in the mid-90s, around when he first met his partner Rachel Owen. Despite that, the song didn’t find itself on an official album release until 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool but was performed at many of the band’s shows over the years. In their first performance of the song in 1995, the band played the song with energy and a variety of instruments that sounded triumphant and hopeful, even in the chorus of “don’t leave.” The chorus seems confident like the speaker knows that the song will keep the speaker’s lover around.

Twenty years later, Yorke separated from Owen, the mother of his children and partner of 23 years. A year later, the studio version of the song was finally released, only vaguely resembling the previous performances. The instrumentation was stripped back except for a keyboard and some ambient plucks, and the entire tone of the vocal performance is morose and melancholy. “Don’t leave,” now sounds much more like a plea. A few months after the release of the album, Rachel Owen passed away from cancer. “Don’t leave,” gained another meaning.

The song was written out of love and was always sung in love and always will be, but with the passage of time, it became a testament to grief as well. At first, it was the grief of a broken relationship, a newfound distance, and the end of an intimacy that had defined them for much of their lives. Relationships end but love is never so discrete. Everything ends but the love continues.

With “True Love Waits,” Yorke made a piece of art to express love which was able to change over time, the way that people do. I imagine that every work of creation can be this way, each piece an altar to something beautiful, and eventually a memorial. Paintings of the past admire the beauty of a landscape or a face, and now we look at them in amazement and sometimes sorrow, remembering what once was. How transcendent is that? That both the loving and the loss can be captured? That another can feel even a part of the most meaningful feelings of the artist?

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I’ve never thought of myself as an ambitious person or someone who cares to have much of a legacy. I imagined things like that were for people who wanted to have their names remembered in history books, who wanted to shift the lives of millions of people. But as I’ve thought more about grief and love, I’ve found my ambition, what I want to be remembered for.

I’d like to paint the skies with my love, build a kingdom of it, with fifty-foot walls, and a moat to keep the grief out. The castle would be made of the beautiful times I’m able to spend with the people I love, it would be made of essays and poems celebrating the splendor of what surrounds me, it would be pictures of us smiling and spilling things on our t-shirts, it would be videos of us screaming at the concerts, voicemails from years ago, goofy selfies from this vacation or that one. I’d like to have such an incredible stronghold of love that I can pretend that I’ll be able to fight off the realities of the world and the inescapable decay.

But the grief will come anyway — it’s already here, in the walls and the floors. I already grieve my younger selves, the days running through the fields as a kid, the moments with my grandparents, people I loved with my entire heart and hopefully are thriving somewhere else, people gone too soon, and millions of other things. I get emotional about going to Blockbuster Video and road trips with my family and playing frisbee with my friends and how tight my nana’s hugs always were, even after all these years. 

Even if I build a kingdom of love, I won’t be ready for the new reasons for grief that will inevitably come. My ambition only goes as far as what I can do now: love like my life depends on it, making art that points to my world, my interests, my people. Art that says, “look how amazing life can be, and how amazing I got to exist at the same time as all of these beauties.” Art that says, “this man loved these things, even if they went away eventually, even if he went away eventually.” And even if no one sees it, I will have an incredible legacy in the love I shared and the love I left for those who were meant to receive it.

And that includes you. I’m glad you’re here. I hope you don’t leave any time soon. I love you.

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💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - A Moon Shaped Pool by Radiohead - one of my favorite albums of all time, if you couldn’t tell

• ARTICLE - “Ahead of Time” by Kamran Javadizadeh - one of the things that inspired this piece

• POEM - “Birthday Poem for my Grandmother” by Sharon Olds - Are the dead there / if we do not speak to them?

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