My Life, My Love
For those who are grieving
Where does our love go after a person is gone?
Love is the most powerful thing in the human existence. It inspires people to do extraordinary things. It makes us believe we can be truly great. It can transform a ruined life.
We crave it, suffer for it, weep for it. It is worth every hardship.
I believe love somehow infuses into our actual physical selves. You can feel it in the electricity of hands touching for the first time, in the warmth of a close hug. It makes our hearts flutter and puts stars in our eyes. I think when someone loves you, that love gets into your blood and bonds with all the elements that have come together to make You. It strengthens you.
Amongst the living, love is a vibrant light. For those who leave this earth first, I believe it is with them as they go into the dark.
While love accompanies the ones who have passed, that same love also remains behind. Time does not matter. It is somewhere in your physical body. It is still here with you.
When you lose someone, you don’t really lose them all at once. Yes, their bed is empty now, and the cup they used to drink their coffee out of every morning now sits cold in the cupboard. I can see their shoes waiting quietly at the doorway for the footstep that will never come again. You can tell yourself as many times as you want that they are gone. But you can feel that love still in your skin. They simply can’t be gone.
That is the grief - the love that remains and has nowhere else to go.
Love is a gift that is given back and forth. In life, we share love with others, and if you are really lucky, you’ll receive that love back ten times greater than before. When a person dies, they’re not there to accept your love anymore, and it grows and grows inside your heart, desperate to escape and be given to someone. There’s only so much you can hold until you think you might burst from the pain of keeping it inside. This is the grief.
Grief is not a monster threatening to devour you. Nor is it a black hole, waiting for you to fall into. It is simply love in another form. In order to fully accept your loss, you must embrace your grief in death, as you embrace your love in life. And just like love, grief also lives on forever, as much as we might wish it didn’t.
We say true love is everlasting, always patient, always forgiving. Grief is also patient. It will wait while you cry. It will be with you while you pick up the pieces and learn to move forward. It is forgiving to our weakness, our anger, our denial, our bitterness. And it is everlasting. It will never really leave us. We just learn to accept it, and let it be our reminder that we know what it felt like to love and be loved.
The most remarkable thing about love is that it never dies. It is true that one day our bodies will lay to rest in that deepest of sleeps, but the love our bodies held throughout our lifetime become next year’s flowers. It continues to grow.
Here at The Halfie Project, though we celebrate the joys of being mixed Korean, it’s no secret that loss is a common theme to the stories here.
We talk about missed relationships with family members, language barriers, faded memories, the lives we dream about, the things our parents never told us, the countries they left behind and the questions unanswered because we never knew what to say or how to ask.
Do those lost things die, too?
I hope they don’t.
We might not have had enough time or courage to know everything about the ones who leave us, but they are still here, nevertheless.
They live on in the shape of your eyes and the color of your skin. The way you laugh, the sound of your singing voice, the foods you like. Those lost things are here, in a way. But this is not a ghost story. It is a love story.
삼가 고인의 명복을 빕니다
Thank you for your kindness, bravery and love. It was an honor to witness.