Dila Cakir

I’m sure some of you have read Claire A. Nivola’s book “Star Child.” In it, she writes:

“To visit planet Earth, you will have to be born as a human child.

At first you will have to learn to use your new body, to move your arms and legs and to pull yourself upright.

You will learn to run, to use your hands, to make sounds and form words.

Slowly you will learn to take care of yourself.

There will be so much for you to learn and so much for you to feel—pleasure and fear, joy and disappointment, sadness and wonder.

You will grow up, travel and work. Perhaps you will have children, even grandchildren, of your own.

Over the years you will try to make sense of that happy, sad, full, empty, always-shifting life you are in.

And when the time comes to return to your star, it may be hard to say goodbye to that strangely beautiful world” (2-26).

I’ve come to realize that if we love, we also grieve. The experience of grief is complicated, woven together with memories of touch, smell and stories. It has a way of sneaking into our lives without us asking it to.

The reminders of someone you once loved appear in the strangest places: A bird passing overhead. The smell of a certain hand soap. A familiar song playing in the background of an otherwise ordinary day.

Nivola tells us that so much of our time is wrapped up in whatever stage of life we happen to be in. Starting grade school, going to college, graduating, having children, having grandchildren and all the stages in between. Sometimes we don’t even realize we’re living through them because we’re so busy looking toward whatever comes next.

It’s suffocating for me sometimes to think about this. That we can’t escape the cycle of life. That everything we know and love is constantly changing, even when we’re not ready for it.

But I think there is excitement entangled in grieving a stage of life, too. I think about when it comes time to move away from home or not share the same last name as your siblings anymore. There is a sadness in recognizing how fleeting these moments are. We mourn the things that are changing, even as we feel a pull toward whatever comes next. Perhaps that is part of the inherent nature of being human: learning to let grief and excitement, endings and beginnings, exist in the same space.

So many of my columns feel repetitive because they all seem to come back to one central idea: slowing down. I feel like we aren’t properly grieving. I feel like we aren’t always allowed to. Our daily lives rarely make room for the things we are still learning to mourn.

Grief manifests in such strange and personal ways. Some people grieve the conversations they never got to have with loved ones. Others grieve the memories they will never get to make again with them. Some withdraw from life completely. Others fill every moment so they don’t have to sit with what they’ve lost. That’s why I use the word “grief” lightly. I imagine every reader will understand this rather frightening word, in a slightly different way.

Grieving death is different from grieving a stage of life. Strangely, we can spend our entire lives knowing that losing people is inevitable, knowing that everyone before us has experienced it and everyone after us will, yet somehow that does not remedy our wounds of loss.

I think the immensity of grief is a reflection of the love someone poured into you. In the same way that love lingers in the smell of a familiar hand soap or in a bird overhead, it lingers in grief. So much of our culture encourages us to move past it, to keep going, to not dwell for too long, as if grief is something we should try to avoid because it will hurt too much. But I think that when we mourn, we are responding to the love we were fortunate enough to receive. And what an honor it is to have loved someone so deeply that their absence can be felt in so many corners of your life.

I also think that after experiencing grief and allowing ourselves to recognize what it truly is, we begin to love differently. We love with more intention. We love a little deeper.

Maybe that’s the strange thing about love and grief: They ask so much of the same things from us. Both tell us to feel deeply, to be present and to accept that nothing stays exactly as it is.

Perhaps the reason we find ourselves so drawn to love is that we’ve learned just how much there is to lose. Or perhaps it is the other way around: Knowing how much there is to lose has made me want to love harder.

Lily Mott is a member of the Class of 2028.