I have been told that grief is just love with nowhere to go. What do we do with that love then? How can we give it a place to go so that, amongst the tears of losing a loved one, we can pick ourselves up and in a sense, move on?
I will start by telling you that I don’t have the answer. When it comes to the grief I feel for my daughter Adlee, I’m really not sure. Yes, it has gotten easier, but I still have days when I cry. I do believe though that she doesn’t want me to waste any time or energy crying over her. What then, am I to do with this love?
I started reading a book today entitled The Heavens Are Open by Wendy W. Nelson. In the introduction, she shares a story about her baby brother who only lived for seven hours. She had been so excited and telling everyone she knew about her new baby brother, only to come home and learn that he had died. Wendy tells us that her grandma took her aside so they could talk and cry together and shares the following experience.
“[My grandma] told me that she had been inconsolable when her grandmother Sarah had died. Then, several months later, Sarah — now living on the other side of the veil — visited Grandma. Sarah sat right on Grandma’s bed. She told my grandmother to stop grieving and get on with her life. Sarah was very much alive and well” (page 8).
I believe that Adlee does not want me to be sad she’s gone. I believe Adlee wants me to be happy. I believe Adlee wants me to love her. I believe Adlee can see more than I can. I believe Adlee wants me to “get on with my life”. I believe Adlee wants us to make her some siblings. I also believe that Adlee understands that this is hard. I believe she knows that I don’t know where to put all my love for her.
As I have been learning about the death and loss of Adlee from a spiritual and eternal perspective rather than a temporal and medical one, there are lessons I am beginning to understand. I am learning that from the Lord’s perspective, healing can translate “into people being freed from all the suffering that accompanied their afflictions and from the vicissitudes of mortal life” (Nelson 4). To me, this says there is always a reason to the healing which translates into the loss of mortal life and a return to Heaven.
Due to the cause of Adlee’s death, Amniotic Band Syndrome (which I wrote about in this blog post), I think she was freed from potential suffering here on earth. Her cute little right hand would have been missing most if not all of her fingers. I can only imagine the challenges, difficulty, and harassment my little angel would have received. Additionally, I have wondered if she was in any pain. With the lack of blood flow from the fibers being intertwined in multiple areas of her umbilical cord, I wonder if she was suffering.
If her death means she gets to evade suffering due to the imperfections of living in a mortal body and imperfect world, then I can learn to be okay with that. I know there are many who would disagree with me or who would be mad at God, but how can I be when there is clearly so much more that I just can’t see? God is good and He is wise. He knows better than you and I. And so, I can be grateful that she is with God. I can be grateful she doesn’t have to suffer. I can be grateful that she is surrounded by some of the best people I know and have never met like my great grandparents or Anthony’s little brother Tre. I can just be grateful.
“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All of that unspent love gathers in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and the hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.” – Jamie Anderson
Perhaps instead of allowing my love to become grief, I need to channel my love into gratitude. Maybe I need to be a little more positive and just be grateful to have a child in heaven to love.
Nelson, Wendy Watson. The Heavens Are Open. Deseret Book, 2019.
