Love bears all things, hopes all things, believes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

I Corinthians 13:7-8

I wrote in a letter to my deceased friend’s parents three years ago (2020).

You hear the verses in weddings, but are they not just as applicable at funerals?

Grief is love that endures – beyond life and beyond loss. It endures. It remains. It loves against all things, against hope, and against the belief for its object of adoration to return.

In the end, it’s love that goes on.

It can make us bitter or it can make us springs of life and of hope and of beauty once more.

Where there were once caverns of bitterness, may there be fields of tenderness.

Where there were once deserts of anger, may there be harbors of forgiveness

Where there were once rivers of sorrow, may there be streams of mercy.

Love transforms us in unfathomable ways. Lost love breaks us with the bleakest measures, but our response to love and love lost distinguishes us entirely.

Some respond out of anger, some shut down in sorrow, and some pretend through avoidance. Each response is unique, with each respondent clinging to the response that feels the most emotionally safe.

Friends and strangers hold their breath and peer at grievers in hopes of a response that will provide them with an image of the grievers’ hearts.

How quick we are to observe the unfathomable, but how slow we are to communicate the tragedy. We look with bravery but cower in speechlessness. All the while, the griever, the sufferer, sits in isolation and trapped in love’s loss.

With fortitude, the sufferer remembers his or her enduring love and allows that mercy to shape the day. Love and truth tear away the temptation bitterness invites: these tools patch up lost love’s damage.

Patched, but not healed. Bandaged, but not mended. The sufferer must reach out beyond the frailty of his or her understanding and leap towards something more. The promise of more – the promise of the fullness of life.

Choosing to trust God beyond all belief, the griever leaps into freedom and the chance for redemption. The chance to experience the beauty of life and the beauty of love restored. The chance to overcome bitterness with a happiness long forgotten. The chance to live abundantly despite every odd being against the individual.

This, this is love enduring. This is love unending. This is love restoring, healing, and beginning.