Grief is Love: Living with Loss by Marisa Renee Lee

Seven years ago, my dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease and in a dreadful double whammy, an unexpected cancer diagnosis followed on its heels.  The past near-decade has been filled with the grief that a family faces when its patriarch shoulders a terminal degenerative disease (with a side of cancer).  In the hustle and bustle of the medical complex, I seem to have forgotten to grieve or maybe I’ve paused it?  In her impressive investigation of grief, Marisa Renee Lee extends a hand to me, and those like me, who have nestled the nuggets of our grief under a protective coating of productivity, avoidance and industrious planning.  Her words land on me as a big sister’s would; Lee gently invites me to sit with all that I’m feeling and find the love that carves out this hollow place that grief is filling.

There are so many things to appreciate about Grief is Love: Living With Loss.  First is what I’ve mentioned already, the necessary reminder that grief is essentially rooted in love.  But there is another layer to grief that is rarely mentioned in books on the subject, and Lee does a tremendous job of honoring that: the grief of witnessing diminishment and the helplessness, isolation and exhaustion that perpetual decline leaves us with.  

Lee wrote “Grief is Love” about the hard nugget of mother-loss at the center of her grief and then, like applying wet strips of newspaper in paper-mache, she wrapped all the other grief she is carrying upon that core: her miscarriage, infertility, the death of her cousin to Covid-19, and with incredible poignance, her experience of being a grieving Black woman boxed in by race in a country that was built upon racism. 

With wisdom and warmth, Lee reminds us that grief only exists in the spaces carved out by love.  Perhaps in the ultimate act of love, we must turn the legacy of those we lose into pillars of our own self-love. By sitting with the devastation of loss, in all its nuance and complexity, we honor the ways that those we love change us.  Lee’s words remind us, “Love is not meant to be contained by death, its strength defies the grave if we give ourselves permission to find it.”