Grief arrives like a summer storm. Sometimes dramatic, with thunder and lightning. Sometimes so subtle you don’t notice it until you feel the rain hit your skin.
Grief is almost uniquely human. Few animals display the kind of grief we humans endure. For us, it’s universal and if you lived long enough, you’ve likely felt the unmistakable heaviness of grief. Overwhelming to the core.
We each deal with grief in our own way. Unlike any other emotion, it tends to bring about the very best—and also the very worst in people. Revisit The Big Chill or Four Weddings and a Funeral if you need a remedial course.
David Kessler gets it right when he speaks about grief leaving a fingerprint. Not a wound or a scar, but a fingerprint. A fingerprint and grief are as unique and individual as the person who passed. That fingerprint is evidence. Evidence that something mattered to us. Evidence that we loved and lost something deeply treasured.
There was a time when people understood grief more intimately than we do now. Grief was communal, shared. Families often displayed the dead in the parlor of the house for several days. Family and friends “sat up” with the dead and mourned together, sharing their favorite stories. Death wasn’t hidden behind institutional walls or outsourced to pale-faced professionals in cheap suits. It was public and shared.
Today the process of grieving is much more efficient. Much more sterile. People often die and are buried in the same week. But I often wonder if that efficiency cheapens the process.
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Pastor John Claypool once wrote that “If we are willing, the experience of grief can deepen and widen our ability to participate in life.
See, Claypool lost his twelve year old daughter to leukemia. He later wrote that “when I remember that she was a gift, pure and simple, something I neither earned nor deserved nor had a right to. And when I remember that the appropriate response to a gift is gratitude…then it puts some light around the darkness and creates the strength to begin to move on. The greatest thing you can do is to remind me that life is a gift… every particle of it, and that the way to handle a gift is to be grateful.”
I often think about Claypool when someone close to me dies. I like to remember that what I lost was never owed to me in the first place. And when I feel grief, the best response is gratitude.
There’s no rush, but the best way to move forward in loss is to develop a sense of gratitude that is greater than the grief. It’s the grief that provides the evidence that something mattered to us. It’s the gratitude that gets us through.
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Grief was never intended to be managed alone. Human connection and hope are essential for navigating deep grief. In the Netflix series After Life, two unlikely strangers share a common bond of grief on a cemetery bench. Below is a wonderful four-minute compilation of their conversations about loss and recovery. (Maybe come back and watch this scene after you finish reading. Get some Kleenex, first.)
We’ve become experts at avoiding reminders that our time on earth is fleeting. People “pass” instead of dying. Nobody sits up with the dead in the parlor. Instead ashes arrive in fancy containers like the ones the veterinarian gives you when a pet dies.
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But grief refuses efficiency. It’s not linear or logical. It shows up at the most inopportune times. It’s often triggered by simple things: the smell of coffee or perfume or the heavy smell of fresh cut grass. Or the familiarity of an old, favorite song. Like an undertow, it pulls you under when you least expect it.
But eventually you realize the fingerprint of grief is not a malfunction. It’s the new normal. That realization changes things. Because eventually grief stops being only about the person you lost. It becomes about the person you become afterward.
What if grief isn’t proof that a life ended but instead, proof that a life happened?
Maybe healing isn’t moving on at all. Maybe it’s learning to move forward while allowing the fingerprint to remain. Because grief, for all its pain, is still evidence. Evidence that someone reached deeply enough into your heart to leave part of themselves in your soul. And over time, gratitude slowly begins to soften the sharpest edges of that loss. Not because the grief disappears, but because you begin to understand that the pain is connected to something amazing and rare.
And perhaps that is the quiet hope hidden inside grief—that even after someone is gone, the mark they left on our soul never fully disappears.
Have you ever struggled with the fingerprint of grief? Tell me about it. Click the link below to send me a message. I promise that you’ll hear back from me.
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