In the early stages of grief, it feels like death — because in many ways, it is.
So much in us dies.
The dreams we held.
The version of the story we believed in.
The pride that kept us standing.
The ego that needed to be right.
The future we had already imagined.
And when we begin to feel like we are dying, everything in us fights death tooth and nail. We resist it. We wrestle with it. We cling to what was, even when what was has already slipped through our hands.
But perhaps one of the hardest truths grief teaches us is this: sometimes, it is okay to die.
Not the death that destroys us, but the death that frees us.
Death to our pride.
Death to our bitterness.
Death to our need to control the ending.
Death to the version of ourselves that could only survive by staying angry, guarded, or numb.
Many times, grief will be the death of you — and that may, in fact, be a holy thing.
In navigating grief, I have found that one of the most shocking revelations on the other side is that, when we allow the process to unfold as it should, the very death that seemed to take us out becomes the ground of resurrection.
The self that died in the valley of the shadow of death emerges across the bridge more alive than ever.
But I wonder how many of us never reach that side of grief.
Because in fighting death, we cling to willpower. We use bitterness as fuel. We remain in survival mode for so long that survival becomes our normal. We love those who stayed, but deep anger still seethes against those who hurt us, those who left us, those who failed us. And so, many parts of us remain dead.
We become our intellect.
Our skill.
Our career.
Our role in the family.
Our ability to function.
But the rest of us remains buried.
We carry fragments of who we were across the bridge into some form of new life, but not necessarily an abundant life. Not the life Jesus died to give us.
We do not walk off into the sunset. We walk into a carefully constructed, man-made version of what we can live with.
Success without peace.
Function without freedom.
Achievement without wholeness.
But on The Other Side of Broken — the side Jesus died to give us — peace is not traded away. It is received.
There is no need to carry bitterness as proof that we survived. We are washed in a river of mercy. His mercy flows to us, and then, astonishingly, it begins to flow through us to others.
And somewhere in that holy exchange, a transformation takes place that we could never have imagined.
So perhaps the real question is this:
How many of us are willing to embrace the death that grief brings, if that death is the doorway to resurrection?
