#brian shuff

“Grief and joy are both part of hospitals, relationships, and life. One is payment for the other. Grief is a bill you get for having loved the person you’ve lost. Grief hurts in direct proportion to how joyous that love was. The lot of every grieving person is to be, in the words of Emily Dickinson, “Enlightened to a larger pain/ By contrast with the love.” The pain that you are “enlightened to” may make you wonder whether having your loved one for the time you did was all worth it. Would there have been less pain if there had been less love?”

“The pain of illness comes from the body. Take your mind off the pain and it can be alleviated. But the pain of grief comes from love, and love can’t be alleviated. In illness there is always hope for healing, even if it’s hope for a last-minute miracle. There is no healing grief. The person is gone, and that fact won’t ever change. As Groucho Marx, Cousins’s salvation, once quipped: ‘Time wounds all heels.’ Sometimes it feels to the griever that time wounds all heals.”