Once you have experienced your first big grief, you live your whole life looking back on that thing. You also spend it looking forward to the rest of life’s losses that will eventually occur. That is why the feeling of anxious anticipation – waiting for the other shoe to drop – is so normal. Life balances itself out. The sum always returns to zero. If things are going swimmingly at the moment, you can be sure a time of want is coming. Don’t worry – once you learn how to grieve, you will always know what to do when the losses arrive. Life is equal parts loss and gain, so you can stop orienting yourself toward always having to be so happy. Then you will be able to accept and receive life as it is, instead of how you think it should be.

You should orient yourself toward and be ready to receive good things, but also bad. You will need some sort of framework for assimilating the losses into the whole that is your life. I cannot even tell you what that framework should be. It is a mystery until you experience it and even after you experience it, it’s hard to put into words. None of the trite things people say about suffering quite hit the spot, and some of them are not true at all.

The only thing that can teach you how to grieve is loss itself. What I can tell you is that the feelings you feel and the thoughts you think in grief are completely normal. The grief itself and the gut-wrenching feelings coursing through your body will form you. That is where the magic happens – where you are liberated, freed from the encumbrance of always having to be happy and needing life to turn out the way you want it to. You don’t need that. You need a very real and gritty way of accepting life as it is – with all its ten-ton heartaches.

Once you have a method for interfacing with loss on a real level, you are unstoppable. Nothing – not even death itself – has power over you. You have welcomed grief in and tuned in to observe the job it has to do. Now the losses are something you can welcome. Not that you or I would wish anything bad to happen, but it is part of life, and there is no need to fear.