25/01/2026
On Love & Grief....words from Christine Colyer - Writer 🙏
I've been thinking about the union
of love and grief.
And I'm wondering:
are love and grief inseparable?
Are they simply two sides of the same coin—
like heads and tails,
top and bottom,
up and down,
life and death?
Can one exist without the other?
Take pain and pleasure,
light and dark,
hope and despair—
not opposites, necessarily,
so much as two sides of a coin,
each holding value for the other—
each side offering perspective
and meaning to the other...
the kind of perspective and meaning that comes from experiencing both sides of something in order to fully appreciate each one.
For example, could we truly know
and appreciate real pleasure
without having intimate experience with pain?
Would we recognize what light was without its absence in the form of darkness?
Would we understand hope—or even need it—if there weren't such a thing as despair?
Though many might argue that hate is the other side of the love coin, I'd argue that we do not need to know hate to understand love.
I'd argue that it's grief, not hate, that gives love its meaning, its sanctity, its superpower.
Because isn't grief, when stripped down to its essence, simply love flipped upside down, momentarily robbed of breath, searching for a new way to exist, to be expressed?
Grief does not exist without love.
And there is no love that doesn't come with a built-in promise of grief.
Unlike hatred, which cannot coexist with love, grief silently holds hands with love, like light with the dark, and like hope with despair.
Love requires us to eventually know grief, it's true, but it also assures us that grief will never take away our love because grief is love—it’s just love in a different form.
Grief guides us toward the expansion of our souls, revealing the power of love, much as despair guides us toward hope, illuminating the same power.
Hatred does not reveal the power of love. Instead, it fights against it and eventually shrinks in the face of love’s ability to overcome.
So, yes, love and grief,
life and death,
light and dark,
hope and despair...
what extraordinary, symbiotic, perfect design!
