{"id":39553,"date":"2023-09-16T00:01:58","date_gmt":"2023-09-16T07:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=39553"},"modified":"2026-06-06T06:12:02","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T06:12:02","slug":"grief-love-with-no-place-to-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/grief-love-with-no-place-to-go\/","title":{"rendered":"Grief — Love With No Place to Go"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"grief<\/a>
Grief is love with no place to go — until a grandchild and their duckie appear on the scene. Photo by Barbara Newall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Grief shows up in lots of different ways. I’ve said this before: Grief has many parts. And lately I’ve been noticing that, without Jon alongside me day in and day out, my love for him has had no place to go all these months and years since his death. And that has made me sad.<\/p>\n

When Love Feels Like Duty<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Love is a word I don’t much like to use. It is vague. It is show-offy. It is used so casually, so cynically these days. Those Christmas cards and birthday cards proclaiming Love! Peace! Joy! What do they mean<\/em> by love anyway?<\/p>\n

So often, “love” feels more like a duty, a virtue to strive for, something you are supposed<\/em> to feel — not something that you come by naturally, if left to your own devices.<\/p>\n

The fact is we humans are good at loving. We need to do it. We don’t have to be brow-beaten into doing it. We do it.<\/p>\n

Grief — Love With No Place to Go<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Now that I’m in my elder years, I’ve come to think that loving some one, some thing — a person, a dog, a place — is a basic human need alongside sleeping, eating and doing what we do to procreate and, once we’ve done that, what we do as we escort our children into adulthood.<\/p>\n

I noticed this human tendency to love during my recent travels through the Midwest as I spent time with relatives — with my daughter, my son and his children, my son’s wife and his in-laws. With cousins on both side of my family.<\/p>\n

What I noticed was how much love I felt, not just for my children and grandchildren, that’s easy, but for the people I’m not as close to — the cousins I knew when we were kids together in the towns and woods of Michigan. My son’s in-laws, whom I met not long after our children met.<\/p>\n

And for all the familiar places, the beaches, the lakes, the towns, my grandmother’s 130-year-old house, the dance pavilion my great-grandparents built 100 years ago.<\/p>\n

\"grief<\/a>
This resort pavilion was built by my great-grandparents early in the 20th century. It holds memories for me of bingo games and square dances led by my great-grandfather. My parents met and fell in love in this room. It is dear to me. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Jackson, Michigan, I visited a cousin. In Pentwater<\/a>, Michigan, more cousins. At a lake resort in the northern woods, my close family and in-laws.<\/p>\n

This was a two-and-a-half week trip and my sadness and grief for Jon slipped away — because, I suspect, my love for him had someplace to go for a time.<\/p>\n

‘If You Can Love . . .’<\/strong><\/h5>\n

A wise older friend back in my single woman days once said to me, “If you can love, you can’t be hurt.”<\/p>\n

I puzzled over those words back then. I had been single way too long and my big goal was to get somebody I loved to love me enough to marry me. It was not clear how being able to love was going to get me to where I wanted to go. How could loving keep me safe, psychologically speaking?<\/p>\n

Now That I’m Older Than My Wise, Old Friend<\/strong><\/h5>\n

But I remember those words even today because they were so remarkable, so counterintuitive.<\/p>\n

Right now I am older than my friend was when he told me this, and I think I finally get it.<\/p>\n

Back from my summer travels, I thought about the people I was with on that trip. There were so many people, I noticed, that I loved.<\/p>\n

One of the perks of getting older, I realized, is that by now you’ve collected up a lifetime of people you love. High school friends. Workplace friends. Neighbors. Grandchildren. Your therapist. The UPS guy.<\/p>\n

\"grief<\/a>
Grief is love with no place to go — so last month I took my grief to this beach along Lake Michigan where I played as child. I loved this place. So did my mother and her mother. Photo by Barbara Newhal<\/em>l<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The other perk is you’re not paying all that much attention to whether they love you back.<\/p>\n

At this point in our lives, we’ve checked all the boxes: We’ve had the careers. We’ve earned a living. We’ve had the spouses and the kids, if we wanted them, or come to terms with not having them. We grew the tulips and the artichokes.<\/p>\n

We’ve done our do, and there’s not a whole lot left for us to do now except notice the people around us and love them.<\/p>\n

More about motherhood from afar at “A 28-Year-Old in the Hospital — 2000 Miles Away.”<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0More about missing Jon at “A Widow’s Christmas Card.”<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"grief<\/a><\/p>\n

Grief changes from day to day. For me right now, without my husband alongside me, grief is love with no place to go.\u00a0 Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49108,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,14],"tags":[34,454,2359,191,383,2764,214,1054,33,2419],"class_list":["post-39553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-my-changing-family","category-widowed","tag-dont-miss","tag-family","tag-grandchildren","tag-grief","tag-lake-michigan","tag-love","tag-michigan","tag-pentwater-michigan","tag-travel","tag-widowed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39553"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49110,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39553\/revisions\/49110"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}