For the past ten days I think I have been dining with grief. Of course, we’ve shared a number of meals over the years. And the times in my life when I wasn’t really eating very much at all had a lot more to do with grief than I was wiling to admit.

You see we all lose people and things and opportunities. Sometimes they are things that we appreciate very much and know we hold dear. Sometimes they are things we took for granted, even tricking ourselves into thinking that they might not matter at all. Even when we think we’re ready to let go, grief is still a process we can never quite prepare for and ultimately can’t avoid.

I lost a marriage and the family that went with it. In the process, I lost a lot of the ideas I had about my own family.  So I have been questioning all of my notions of myself.  You have seen some of the machinations of that inquiry in my writing. I know it’s not been pretty.

Those of you who have actually sat down with grief and made its acquaintance know that it requires you to lose a part of yourself. Sometimes the loss being grieved is precipitated by the loss of self. Without exception, once a loss has occurred, it is our greatest fear that we will lose ourselves entirely.  Perhaps the only greater fear is that no one will notice.

Each loss impacts who we are to ourselves and others. One way or another, grief can define us. We can resist with too much terror or engage with too much despair.  Embraced gently, like the breaking, beating hearts we all are, grief redefines us, over and over again.

So these dates that didn’t make my calendar have been a long time coming. They say grief waits. And I have certainly waited to try to avoid dealing with it. But eventually it catches up with you, you catch up with it, or, in my case, I run so far in so many different directions that I end up crashing into myself, again.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, a name mentioned more than once in the course of my dinners to date, has written a book entitled No Matter Where You Go, There You Are. I suspect it could be the working title for all of our lives, but I know it has resonance for mine.

We can get lost in the searching and forget who we are.  Grief’s greatest gift is the chance to reacquaint ourselves with our own hopes and fears. It is a reminder to live on purpose, intent on making the most of what we have while we have it.

Grief is a way to strengthen ourselves so that we can open our hearts even further, fully aware of the courage being asked of us. We go on loving and hoping and dreaming and making our mistakes not because we might get hurt, but because we will get hurt and when we do it is the good that will sustain us.

My encounter with grief has physically manifested in a very bad cold, an intellectual reminder that I cannot separate any aspect of my health from another. But here I am, hungry to be writing again, despite the figurative lump in my throat.

My time grieving has me thinking about resilience. We all lose things and we all grieve. We also create and find ways to thrive. Grief simply changes our perspective, blurring our vision to force us to turn inward before washing our eyes clean to face the world again.