“What matters most is how well you walk through the fire” Charles Bukowski

Grief is a really big word. It is enveloping, it is debilitating, it is lethal, it is a brief interlude on the trail of life, it is inconsequential, it is defining, it wells up and physically stops us from functioning, and it sits happily in the corner waiting while we go through the motions, it becomes the sum of the motions, it is everything, it is nothing.

The older I get the more I realise that if life has a meaning, well grief is it. More of that later.

Grief is a broad human emotion. Like love, it intersects, flavours, supercharges and poisons our lives in a multitude of ways. In most ways love is the precursor to grief. They are two sides of the same precarious coin.

For better or worse I have had my share of both.

When we think of grief we probably think of people who have lost loved ones to death, the bereaved. Of course, that is a particularly visceral flavour of grief, and I have had my share of that. I have lost a parent, grandparents, aunty, good friends and business partners. The two give-ins are death and taxes, even if we only truly believe the later will apply to us.  

But grief is bigger than that. Grief can occur for lost relationships, lost opportunities, lost businesses, and lost lives. I have friends with chronic health conditions, and they grieve for the life they had before. That grief for a time when the possibilities of life were laid open to them is just as valid as the grief for someone who has passed away. They are different, they are both grief.

Last year I lost the company I founded. After 12 years the relationship that underpinned that business finally frayed to the wind. A death served as the catalyst for the parting, but the relationship had been doomed for years, probably from the very start.

When I took the decision to leave the business partnership, it wasn’t made without coercion, but it was my decision, a lot of people said you will go through grief later on. It will hit you when you are gone.

Grief did come, but not for the company. Some people might think grieving a company is kind of strange, but when it is something, you have sacrificed blood, sweat, and tears for, worked for years towards, grieving its loss seems fair.

However, when it came to it the relief of being free of a toxic relationship and of being free of the responsibility to make it all work seemed to override any feelings of loss for the business.

I did however grieve, I still am. The thing that keeps sitting heavily on my heart is the thought of all the things and the relationship I sacrificed for the business I have now left. For as long as I was still fighting the good fight for the brewery those sacrifices were, perhaps, worth it. Now that the brewery is lost to me those sacrifices were absolutely not worth it. And I find myself in late middle age in a whirlwind of regret, in a whirlwind of grief.

Would my relationship still be going if I hadn’t embarked on the brewing business? Probably not, but who can tell absolutely. The road not taken is the road not mapped.

What is certain is that here I am approaching the half century without the lover, without the business, and without a job. Fixating on these things is totally unhelpful and pointless. Fixating on these things is totally human.

Coming back to the meaning of life. Well, I am sure there are people for whom life progresses perfectly and every night sees a loving orgasm and the whisky never causes a headache, and they never walk the dog while their mind rages over every detail of just how they ended up here in this hole… but for most of us grief is the meaning, grief is the substance, grief is the inevitable.

Grief is the proof that existence matters to us, that we aren’t simply asleep. Even if sometimes we would prefer to be.