A widow comes to Joe convinced she needs to “let go” to move past grief — to stop thinking of her life as “us” and make it about “me.” Joe questions the entire framing. Grief isn’t a phase you exit by letting go of the love; the missing of someone lasts a lifetime, and that’s not a problem to be solved. The work isn’t to end the love but to let it change shape.
When she frames her dilemma as either keeping the photos up or putting them away, either “us” or “me,” Joe refuses the binary. He asks what she’d do if she simply kept doing her work for “us” — and the answer is identical to what she’d do for herself. Nothing actually needs to be given up. What changes is not the presence of the love but how widely it flows.
“Maybe there’s something we can do that just shows allows that rip of reality to actually be a gift rather than a a weirdness.”
The “purgatory” she feels stuck in dissolves the moment she stops treating the love as something to graduate from. Death is “a little rip inside of reality,” and that rip is not just a wound — it’s an opening into a love that’s bigger than the one relationship.
Related Concepts
- Grief is the dissolution of identity
- You cannot lose the love someone gave you
- Letting go comes from seeing the pain of holding on
- Our stories and identities cannot survive death
- Personal love can be made non-personal and given to the world
- The person who loved you is a conduit to loving everything
- Grief unlocks joy after narcissistic abuse
- Grief of self-abandonment