04/12/2025
Quote by Martin Prechtel:
“Grief expressed out loud, whether in or out of character, unchoreographed and honest, for someone we have lost … is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”
Those words don’t just land—they stay. They remind us that grief isn’t a burden—it’s love refusing to let go.
Because we don’t grieve to suffer—we grieve to honor. To bear witness to what mattered.
To feel their absence in everything, because their presence once meant everything.
Grief isn’t weakness. It’s devotion. A slow, trembling song we keep singing long after the music has stopped.
We’ve been taught to hide it. To clean it up. To move through it quickly, politely.
But what if grief didn’t need to be quiet to be dignified? What if the trembling voice, the cracked heart, the unexpected tears at random—what if that’s love, still speaking its truth?
Grief is remembrance. It’s memory in motion. It’s the shape love takes when it has nowhere to land. And when we let it out—unpolished, unrehearsed—we’re not breaking down. We’re lifting something up.
We’re saying: Their life mattered. Their love mattered. And it changed me. That’s not weakness. That’s strength in its purest form.
We praise what we miss, honor what we remember. And in that, we keep them close.
So no, grief isn’t the end of the story. It’s the part where love refuses to be forgotten, and insists it still has something left to say.
And maybe that’s where gratitude begins.
Not because we’re glad they’re gone. But because we’re forever grateful they were here.
