Grief Is Love Unfinished

There is a short line that Chaplain Barbel Wray, who goes by Barb, comes back to again and again: grief is love unfinished. It fits on a card, and for many people it changes how they understand what they are carrying. If you have ever felt that your sadness was bigger or stranger than the word “sad” allows, this may be why.

What the phrase is pointing at

We tend to talk about grief as if it were one feeling. It is not. Underneath the tears there is a relationship, and every relationship, the loving ones and the painful ones, has things in it that never got finished. Words that were never said. An apology that never came, or one you never gave. A hope that things would get better someday, which ran out of someday.

Love does not stop when a person dies, or when a marriage ends, or when someone walks out of your life. It simply has nowhere to go. That is the unfinished part. The caring is still there, but the person it was meant for is not available to receive it.

Why the unfinished part keeps us stuck

Most of us are taught very little about what to do with a loss. We learn how to gain things: how to study, work, save, build. Nobody sits us down and explains what to do when something or someone is taken away. So we do what we were told by the people around us, and a lot of what we were told was not much help.

• Keep busy, and the feeling will pass.
• Be strong for everyone else.
• Give it time.
• Don't dwell on it.

Time by itself does not finish anything. Years later a song, a smell or a date on the calendar can bring the whole weight back, because the things we never said are still sitting there. Barb's own words on this are plain: there is no time line and no time limit for grief. What changes things is not the number of months. It is what you do with the unfinished parts.

It is not only about death

When people hear the word grief they usually think of a funeral. Barb's work reaches wider than that. Grief follows divorce, estrangement and abandonment. It follows a parent who was never there, a broken trust, a friendship that faded, a dream that did not happen. In each case there is a relationship, or the hope for one, and something about it that you wish had been different, better or more.

That includes relationships that were hard, and even relationships that were awful. You can grieve someone who hurt you. In fact the more painful the relationship, the more there can be left unsaid. Grieving them does not mean pretending it was good. It means being honest about what it was, and about what you wish it had been.

What finishing can look like

Finishing a relationship in this sense does not mean forgetting the person, or deciding you no longer love them. It means giving the unspoken things somewhere to go, so they stop running your days from underneath. Barb teaches the Grief Recovery Method®, which is built around specific actions rather than waiting and hoping. The work is done one relationship at a time, looking honestly at what happened and at what you wish had been different, better or more, and then finding completion.

Barb is clear that this is for people who want to feel better and are willing to do the work. It is not quick, and it is not passive. But it is also not a matter of digging up pain for its own sake. The aim is that you can remember your person, or your marriage, or your childhood, and carry the memory without being pinned down by it. You will still miss them. You will still love them. The difference is that you are no longer stuck.

A few gentle questions to sit with

• Is there something you wish you had said, or had heard, before it ended?
• Is there a hope you had for this relationship that never got its chance?
• When a memory comes up, do you feel the love, or only the ache of what is missing?

There are no right answers here, and you do not have to sort them out alone. Naming what is unfinished is often the first honest step. If you would like to talk it through with someone who will simply listen, Barb offers a free, confidential 45 minute consult on Zoom, with no obligation.