The Grief Is Never Ending but so Is the Love

Make sure to tell your people that you love them

By Kelty Duval

If you haven’t experienced a lot of loss in your life, grief might be a foreign concept to you, and that’s okay. I wish I hadn't become so well versed in it. In case you haven’t heard already, September is Suicide Prevention and Awareness Month. I will be honest, I didn’t know that myself until I became affected by suicide. Last winter, I lost my brother and a friend to suicide, and with their deaths, I became acutely aware of how suicide is affecting our society today. Thus, I was formally introduced to the emotion called grief.

Some people have already experienced a lot of grief in their lives, while others have made it to this point with minimal exposure. I had been incredibly lucky; up until the beginning of 2023, I had only minimal bumps and scrapes with grief. Sure, my great grandparents had passed throughout my childhood, and I had lost too many pets to count, but I soon learned that there are more sides to grief than I had previously experienced. It was as if I had always been in the shallow end of the pool and could always pull myself out fairly quickly. When I actually met grief in its truest form, it felt as if I had been thrown into the deep end of the pool with my legs tied together.

The problem with grief is that it comes in waves. As a creature of habit and optimism, I wanted so badly to ignore all of the things I was feeling. I wanted to swim against the current and hope that I could wake up from this awful nightmare and everything could be like before. And when that didn’t work, I wanted to swim a few years ahead, wade in the waves where the wound had finally scarred over.

As is common with many survivors of suicide loss, part of me felt angry at them. But I didn’t want to be angry with them because I loved them. I tried to hide that part of my pain away, telling myself that I had no right to be angry. But I was, and I did have a right to be angry. They had left me, and they no longer had to feel all of the terrifying feelings I was having to navigate.

I adamantly refused to ride the waves of grief and feel what I was feeling. I fought, I flailed, but I finally gave in. Some days, everything seemed like it weighed a million pounds, like darkness was creeping in on all sides. Other days, I felt completely desensitized to the world around me.

When my best friends and I were informed of our friend’s passing, someone described the feeling as, “My heart immediately dropped out of my butt.” It felt as if someone had decided to cut a them-shaped-space in my heart that could never be filled, like the piece of my heart that I had given them had been taken with them when they left.

On my grieving journey, I learned that that grief is just another form of love. I loved my brother so much that I felt so much pain when he left. Grief is just the left over love that we never got to give.

I don’t know if love could have saved my brother or my friend, but I think that if they could have felt how loved they were, there could still be a chance that they’d still be around.

In the past year I have learned how incredibly important it is to tell your people that you love them. Ever since, I have made sure to tell my friends and family that I love them every single time I walk out of the door or hang up the phone. Constantly saying “I love you” doesn’t take away any meaning of the words by saying it twenty times a day, it just means that my people know what they mean to me. I never want to see someone in my life ever feel like they are not loved.

Going forward, I challenge you to make the people in your life aware of how much they mean to you and how valued they are in this world. Tell your people you love them so often that it gets annoying.The grief is never ending, but so is the love and as long as the love is never ending, the grief will become easier to carry.