Learning to Love “Them” Differently

Some of the things I hear most often in grief work are “I can’t let go,” or perhaps, even more painfully, “I don’t want to let go.” And that is understandable because letting go can feel almost cruel to us as grievers. After all, when someone dies, we have already lost so much. Their physical presence. Their voice in the next room. The phone calls. The conversations. The ordinary routines we never realized were sacred until they disappeared.

And now we are supposed to let go?

My response has been, and will always be, that I think we sometimes misunderstand what letting go actually means. Letting go does not mean forgetting. It is NOT abandonment. It does not mean loving them less, putting away the photographs, avoiding the memories, relinquishing the relationship, or pretending that their life (and their death) did not fundamentally change ours. It’s the moment when our love stops saying, “stay here because I need you,” and begins whispering, “go where you need to go because I love you.”

For grievers whose spiritual beliefs allow for the continuation of the soul after death, death is not simply an ending. It is a transition. The person we love has somewhere else to go. Something else to become. Some work beyond our understanding that belongs to them now. As a griever myself, I have come to believe that one of the most sacred gifts we can give someone who has died is our blessing to continue their journey. Not because our grief is imprisoning us. And certainly not because there is anything wrong with desperately wanting them back. But because love, in its most mature and purest form, has never been about possession. Love has always required release. And as impossible as this particular release may seem, believe it or not, we have practiced it many times before.

We let them go the first time they walked into a classroom without us.

We let them go when they moved away.

We let them go when they chose another parent, another partner, another city, another life.

We let them go when we stopped rescuing them from every mistake and allowed them to experience the consequences of their own choices.

We let them go when they needed someone we could not become for them.

Again and again, life has asked us to loosen our grip without loosening our love.

In this sense, death asks something similar of us, although on a scale unlike anything that came before it. For the griever, it means finding the courage to say to our loved one:

“I don't want you to go. I would give anything for you to stay.

But if there is somewhere you are needed now, you do not have to remain here for me.

I love you enough to let you go, and I will carry our love from here.

You are free.”

This is one of the great paradoxes of grief…we gradually learn to live without someone's physical presence while continuing to live with their love. They are no longer beside us in the way they once were, but their existence in our lives does remains. Think about it. We carry their stories. Their mannerisms appear unexpectedly in our own. Their lessons shape our decisions. Their humor still makes us laugh. Their values become part of how we move through the world. Sometimes we hear their voice in our minds at precisely the moment we need it. Sometimes we know exactly what they would say. Sometimes we catch ourselves doing something exactly the way they did it and smile, confirming our connection remains, what changes is its form.

To me, letting go really means releasing the physical form of the relationship while preserving the emotional and spiritual bond. And human beings have been practicing this kind of release for as long as we have been loving one another. Parents have watched children leave home and walk into lives they could no longer control. Families have stood at train stations, airports, doorways, hospital rooms, and countless other thresholds, learning to bless journeys they desperately wished were not happening.

So, instead of asking our loved one, “why did you leave me?” I think a better question is “what are you doing now?”

There is something profoundly comforting in this in that it changes our relationship with grief, and allows us to imagine that the person we love is not simply gone, but continuing in a way we may not yet understand. Because loving someone who has died means still speaking to them. It means still living the lessons they taught us, and continue to teach. It means forgiving what remains unfinished, and honoring their presence within us. It means allowing ourselves to laugh, and to live a life they would recognize as ours, and one they would still enjoy being a part of. It means means that moving forward is not the same as moving away from them. It means loving them through their journey, and trusting that we do not have to hold on in order to remain connected. It means learning how to love them differently.