Welcome to December’s Non-Fiction Feature, friend! Today is a book review and personal reflection that touches on grief and loss. I am writing about the book, Grief is Love: Living with Loss by Marisa Renee Lee, and also sharing other lessons I have learnt in my recent experience with grief with the passing of a paternal aunt who I call Abu. This is a very personal post and it has many emotions including sadness, anger, helplessness, hope, so read on, or don’t, based on where you are right now.
I turn to writing to help me and this book was a great choice – it has given me words I could not come up with, it validated a lot of what I was feeling while also reminding me of things that are unique to me. Let’s take a look at what this book is about.
Grief is Love: Living with Loss
Marisa Renee Lee | Goodreads
In Grief is Love, author Marisa Renee Lee reveals that healing does not mean moving on after losing a loved one — healing means learning to acknowledge and create space for your grief. It is about learning to love the one you lost with the same depth, passion, joy, and commitment you did when they were alive, perhaps even more. She guides you through the pain of grief—whether you’ve lost the person recently or long ago—and shows you what it looks like to honor your loss on your unique terms, and debunks the idea of a grief stages or timelines. Grief is Love is about making space for the transformation that a significant loss requires.
In beautiful, compassionate prose, Lee elegantly offers wisdom about what it means to authentically and defiantly claim space for grief’s complicated feelings and emotions. And Lee is no stranger to grief herself, she shares her journey after losing her mother, a pregnancy, and, most recently, a cousin to the COVID-19 pandemic. These losses transformed her life and led her to question what grief really is and what healing actually looks like. In this book, she also explores the unique impact of grief on Black people and reveals the key factors that proper healing requires: permission, care, feeling, grace and more.
The transformation we each undergo after loss is the indelible imprint of the people we love on our lives, which is the true definition of legacy. At its core, Grief is Love explores what comes after death, and shows us that if we are able to own and honor what we’ve lost, we can experience a beautiful and joyful life in the midst of grief.
Content notes include grief, overwhelming emotions, loss of a loved one, miscarriage, infertility and suicide ideation.
Grief is Love – Book Review
In under 200 pages, Marisa offers a lifetime of wisdom. I picked up this book a few weeks after Abu passed away and through my journaling and reading articles about grief, I felt like I was in a good place to take on the truths in this book.
I began with a short essay called ‘Grief is Love’. Marisa confirmed what I had read in many online articles that the pain I am experiencing because of Abu’s absence is because I have experienced a great love. Four paragraphs into this book, I could take Marisa’s words and embrace them as mine with slight changes. And as I read and found more instances of sentiments that were true for me, I added them into my journal as my own. Sometimes, we need other people’s words to help us navigate the mess we feel inside. I am so grateful to read Grief is Love.
You have permission: The Circle of Grief
Marisa acknowledges how grief isn’t something we openly talk about and yet it has a presence in many of our lives. Jody Carrington, author of Feeling Seen, talks about grief and mourning in her book as well. It’s interesting to me that I was reading Jody just a few weeks before Abu passed away and thinking about the loneliness of grief. The Book of Boundaries by Melissa Urban touches on a similar concept of the circle of grief.
Our society struggles to deal with death, suffering, illness and loss. Given our inability to deal with death, we definitely do not have a culture for supporting someone going through it.
The Vook of Boundaries
How do we even support something that we do not completely understand or how long it may even take? Marisa says that we don’t even know ourselves sometimes how we want to be supported.
Uniqueness of my Grief Journey
Loss while living away
Every loss is different. While it has been helpful to find commonalities with Marisa, there are a few other dimensions to my loss that her experiences do not have.
In tough times, I have often reflected on the choice of migration. As a hopeful 20-year old, what did I really know about moving to another country? I thought I was leaving home to go live in another home (my Dad’s) and pursue education and build a good life for myself. I would have more opportunities than I did in India. All that is true but in the nine years of making another place my home, the layers to that decision are still revealing slowly to me. The wedding and then Abu’s passing brought many of them to the forefront of my mind.
The pain of not being around multiple people who had relationships with her and knew my relationship with her runs deep. I could get on a plane and go to my mom and grandparents but I can’t because I don’t know how long I need and grief isn’t something I can call upon on demand and expect not to come uncalled for. It’s something I am unpacking at an unpredictable pace. So I rely heavily on my wonderful husband, Clinton, and also on my best friends to make sense of where I am. Clinton met Abu briefly and I know Abu would have hit it off if she had met Laur, Tiffany and Ariel. Four people who didn’t really know her are so important in my journey to live with her memory. Marisa touches on this too. Her husband never knew her mother and it is her death where Grief is Love begins.
Losing Names
We talk about a loss of identity due to the passing of a loved one. But in some cultures such as mine, it is more concrete than that. I think of the upbringing I had, the special names in my culture that we give to relationships. I feel the loss of the special names she had for me and the name I had for her. No one will ever call me that and there is no one I will call Abu.
I think of ways in which I would give something similar to my kids. I think of my childhood like I never have before. I go back to the house of my grandparents where I spent my summer, the old study which was my dad’s and then Abu’s where I spent the afternoons looking through their book collection and discussing psychology with Abu one time. I realize that I may not have her but I will always have her memories. She may not pick up the phone, there is no number to call anymore, but if I say “Hi Abu”, I get a reply back “Hi Khuchar” or ‘Hi Dumbal” because that’s what she would say. I don’t have a recording of her voice but I can hear it in my head.
You can access their love, their energy indefinitely because it’s in you. It hasn’t gone away. Everything they poured into you over the years didn’t die when they died.
Grief is Love, Chapter 10
What is required to live in the midst of loss today?
Some days my answer is to read a book, some days it is to write. Other days I feel a demotivation so deep I just sit with my cats. Abu always enjoyed seeing pictures of them.
On Comforting Grief
We often talk about confronting our grief but if grief is love then why do we need to confront it?
I am learning to comfort my grief. She is the part of me that dearly misses the memories Abu and I could not make together. She is also the part that feels the most pain at the ways things didn’t unfold, times when I didn’t know better. It was too soon for Abu to leave me and I am learning that it is ok to feel that way.
Grief, like love, is also limitless, which means we have to find a way to live with it. To understand that it is your deep love for the person. Your loss is yours alone; no matter who you lost or when you lost them, you deserve to honour that love, you deserve to live a full life after death while still loving them.
Grief is Love, ‘Grief is love’ essay
Love and living with love.
On Experiences I don’t have yet
Marisa touches on many aspects of grief that I hadn’t thought of or experienced yet: the period before death, the responsibilities as the executor of the will or inheritor of the assets, the grief where both partners are grieving a loss rather than just one. Thus, I found this to be a holistic book.
On the Grief of Black Women in US
Throughout the book, Marisa often shares about the experience of grief in Black women in the US. It’s what she grew up with. However, for something like grief which goes beyond race and color, I felt that including race, and talking specifically about Black women grief in the US, alienated me, when it could have been easy to include everyone or give less specifics. The paragraphs about the unrest and dissatisfaction with US politics and institutions were too much detail in my opinion.
I am not denying their link to Marisa’s grief. I am questioning the lack of mention of the trauma men and women around the world go through. Colonization and slavery are not experiences unique to the US. This is where Grief is Love fell short for me. I personally would have liked to just read about grief and little about the US but I also understand the motivation to include these additional things because they are an important factor in what led to this book being written.
There are no rules to how we process and write about grief. I see this as a practice of being kind to the author, accepting their truth, and taking what I need from it.
The first loss that reminds us of the mortality of our existence is also the one that foreshadows the hard times to come. They are unavoidable and it has been great to find solace in Grief is Love. I may come back to it in the future or I might continue my search for other books that are equally impactful.
Add it to your Goodreads shelf if you are intrigued.
I read this book back in January. Last month, Grand Central Publishing sent me a copy when the paperback came out! It’s nice to add it to my collection.
Here’s all that I have covered in Non-Fiction features of the months in 2023:
January: Made for More by Lindsey Sealey
February: The Book of Boundaries by Melissa Urban
March: Workday Warrior by Ann Gomez
April: Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
May: Ikigai: The Japenese Secret to a long and happy life by Hector Garcia Puigcerver and Francesc Miralles
June: How to Keep House while Drowning by K.C. Davis
July: The Lost Art of Good Conversation by Sakyong Mipham
August: From Chaos to Creativity by Jessie L. Kwak
September: Valley of the Birdtail by Andrew Stobo Sniderman, Douglas Sanderson
October: The Future of Us by Jay Ingram
November: The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Ruben
Other non-fiction that were highlighted on the blog were What makes love last? by John M. Gottman & Nan Silver and Wedded Wife: A Feminist History of Marriage by Rachael Lennon. Memoirs: Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom and Becoming a Matriarch by Helen Knott.
I hope you have enjoyed these and will join me again in 2024 for another round! 🙂
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