Without love our grief would all but disappear. The essential fuel for grief is love.  Each tear you shed is connected to the love. We can contrast this with our cultural assumption which seems to think of grief as more a nuisance and a meaningless nuisance at that. Oh, how we have that wrong.

I once met a man from the Dagura tribe in Africa. He described his shock and disbelief when he first arrived in the USA, about the lack of open grieving. He couldn’t believe it. His culture sees grief as essential and life giving. In fact they see the tears of the bereaved as fuel for the grieved person to find their way in the afterlife. They would literally try and grieve as much as they could in order to aid their loved one. Imagine his confusion when he came to this country to see the way that grief is ignored and devalued. His tribe, the Dagura, saw the power of grief and also connected the grief with meaning. It meant something to the people of the Dagura to grieve. It was an important task that had meaning. When he came to the US he saw a culture that firmly believed that grief was meaningless! He realized right away that this assumption that grief was meaningless was hurtful and unhealthy. We are truly living in a crazy place.

We can learn from the Dagura. Our grief indeed has meaning, one reason among many is that it is connected to our love.