The Impossible Truths of Love

by Hannah Beckerman

Over the past year she has learnt that even with your closest friends, there is a time limit on grief. There is a point at which discomfort creeps around the edges of people’s sympathy, a flicker of impatience visible in their eyes. She has learnt to tuck her grief inside a box behind the wall of her chest, to be taken out and handled with care only when she is alone.

Grief, Annie is discovering, does not follow a neat, linear trajectory. It does not, contrary to popular aphorism, get easier with every day. It does not gradually recede, like a tide that only ebbs but never flows. Instead, it is more like an unpredictable season of tropical storms that can be whipped into a tempest out at sea before crashing onto land, disabling everything in its path, without any warning.

I learnt a long time ago that the people you’re related to by blood aren’t always those you’re closest to. Sometimes you have to find your own version of love, your own version of family.

Grief, she is learning, is love’s echo: it is not possible to have one without the other.

generous with their time, open with their hearts, devoid of any judgement.

in his response she had found exactly what she needed: to be held, to be allowed silence, to be afforded space to gather her scattered thoughts.

Familial love, she now understands, bears little relation to biology. Love transcends genetics, that much she has learnt.

There is not, she thinks, a name for this feeling. It is an uncanny sense of connection, of affinity, of belonging. It is yearning and kinship and hope and trust wrapping themselves around her heart.