The Power of Letting Go

If we do not grieve what we miss, we are not praising what we love. We are not praising the life we have been given in order to love. If we do not praise whom we miss, we are ourselves in some way dead. So grief and praise make us alive. (Martin Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust: On Grief and Praise)

How we live now makes it hard to truly grieve. We're encouraged to keep our grieving seemly, and to "move on" and get back to our normal lives as quickly as possible, and many of us do not have people around us who are genuinely able to hold space for the natural process of grieving to do its work. And because grief is a natural response not only to the death of someone we love, but to other kinds of loss and change - in fact, it's…