From: WireTap

No other time in my life have I thought this much about love. This is partly because I have more time to consider it and partly because for the first time in my adult life, I’m in a committed and healthy romantic relationship. But the real reason I’m thinking about love more than ever is because I’m grieving the loss of a friend, and as it turns out, grief makes you think about love.

In January my best friend died from third degree burns that she received in a chemical explosion at the lab where she worked. She was twenty three. One day, the phone calls instructing me to send DVDs and music to the hospital turned into text messages that documented her failing health. In three weeks, the woman who I simply assumed would be part of the rest of my life, the woman who helped me believe I was competent, a woman who reminded me that love is work, was gone.

I loved her very much. I think of when she was alive, when we were in college and spending hours together, going to class together and growing desperate to graduate. I think of finding support in someone who was able to see through many of the layers I had donned on myself for survival. She, like me, believed that love wasn’t about romance or words; it was political and personal. Love was not simply honesty or trust or affection or care or respect, it was all of those things. Love was about working away from oppression and violence and power, towards justice.

I love her now in a way that is completely new to me. Because with my feeling of love are intense feelings of pain, loneliness, fear and anger. This kind of love, the kind of love tangled up in grief, has affected all of my relationships. I struggle to openly love the people around me because it hurts too much. I see how tired and helpless and frustrated my friends and family and partner are when they are with me. They have put so much energy into giving me the things I need to move through the days, but they aren’t getting anything back from me. Loving feels too vulnerable now. It feels exhausting and painful.

About a month ago, I went with a loved-one to the ocean. I watched the waves meet both shore and falling rain and I felt a wail rise up in my throat. I was too afraid to simply scream my dead friend’s name repeatedly while someone else was around me. Had I been alone, I would have knelt on the rocks, and sobbed her name over and over. I didn’t do those things. I choked back my sobs because I was afraid to express pain for my friend. I was afraid to show love for her in such a vulnerable and emotional way.

Like loving, grieving is a process that is shaped by our experiences, by institutions and families and cultures. Finding our own way to love and grieve openly, is difficult work. Like grief, love is a difficult subject for many people to discuss. Like love, grief is its own kind of work. It’s work that changes over time, but can last a lifetime. It’s work that calls for self examination but also for a recognition of the larger issues that shape who we are and who we can be. It’s work, that, if we are lucky, we will do with the support of a community of people and not by ourselves.
—Nina Jacinto