A reflective essay on meaning after grief: how love, faith, and purpose endure when the crying stops and life must be lived again.
This essay follows Grief, Part One, which explored the first year after loss, when sorrow overwhelmed all other efforts and meaning was not yet possible.
When grief loosens its grip enough for us to breathe again, questions arise, among them: what does it mean to continue living, loving, and choosing purpose in its aftermath?
When Grief Arrives
When we lose someone very precious, someone we have invested our love, care, and attention, grief pays us a long visit.
Grief is both suffering and healing. It unfolds as a process largely independent of meaning or understanding; it is not under our control.
There are those who seek a why as a way of coming to terms. In my experience, during the first year of grief over my daughter’s death, all thoughts were pushed aside. There was zero room for questions; there was only room for sobs, tears, endless tears.
Only later, after many months, when the crying subsided, did another layer emerge, one that had been waiting quietly in the background: the question of meaning.
Looking for Answers
What does it mean to pour one’s life, love, and care into another being, or into a cause, a skill, or a creative endeavor, only to see it annihilated—by illness, by violence, by time, by “progress,” by indifference, by forces utterly beyond our control?
What does this annihilation say about our beliefs, and the depths of those beliefs? What does it say about our devotion, our efforts, our love? What does it say about our own importance, and the purpose of our lives?
I did not ask why it had happened, as I knew in my heart there would never be a satisfactory answer. I assumed an impenetrable mystery.
I found myself questioning whether the meaning that had driven my life had been based on an illusion.
Illusions of Permanence
We live as though life is linear—as though what we build accumulates steadily and is handed forward intact. But history moves in cycles. Civilizations rise and fall. Patterns repeat.
If we live long enough, many of us return to a state of dependency, infants again, though likely with far less charm. We can experience physical vulnerability and mental confusion; and must deal with the certain knowledge that we are about to cross a frontier, often against our will and certainly without our defenses and our strong opinions.
Even at the height of success, when our influence and strength feels solid and enduring, we are not exempt from what lies just beyond the corner: questions of meaning and purpose in the face of ultimate vulnerability.
Responses to Loss
People respond differently to devastating loss.
Some devote their lives to preventing or reducing similar suffering in others. Some blame themselves. Some withdraw. Some rage. Some grow bitter. Some invite death. Some soften with compassion and love.
And some, faced with the choice of abandoning meaning or renewing it, choose meaning and purpose, deepening commitment; we act despite the fragility and impermanence of our effort. Faith does not have to become undone in the face of experience; it can be refined by it. Love, though wounded, can carry us forward.
What Remained
I am a person of faith. I believe I was placed here for a reason. I believe I was placed here at this moment in history for a reason. I believe I am here to serve.
This does not mean I have lived an ascetic or deprived life. I have known pleasure, richness of experience, creative fulfillment, and I have made my share of mistakes.
The loss of my daughter did not teach me humility. Rather, the experience itself, independent of any effort on my part, deepened me. I was forced to confront the fragility of body and mind, and of effort, and in doing so, rediscovered the enduring strength of soul.
What remained was an understanding of my place in the stream of life that existed before me and will continue after me.
True humility is not self-contempt, victimhood, or self-effacement. It is accurate perception.
What Endures
Perhaps meaning is not what we think it is. Perhaps there is no ultimate meaning. Perhaps we are born with a path predetermined, or maybe we are the ones who must choose meaning; for a life without meaning or purpose is a sorry affair.
Living with meaning and a sense of purpose is an act of love and it is the very essence of resilience.
Love is not subject to fashion or opinion. It endures in hardship, in loss, in difficulty. And it is ennobling. If everything you have invested in is taken away or inevitably changes, or when you yourself come to die, the fact that you have been a loving, caring presence to others, to your work, and to yourself — marks a life well lived.
Love is demanding. Its loss is devastating. And yet the heart is made to be broken—and it has the power to mend. Its wisdom increases with every blow.
Scar tissue on the heart is like wrinkles on the face: testimony to a life fully lived.
A Closing Sound Practice (2–3 minutes)
If you wish, pause here.
Sit comfortably.
Let your breath settle without trying to change it.
Place one or both hands lightly over the center of your chest.
On a slow exhale, gently sound the vowel Ah pitching it to your heart center allowing the resonance to be felt in the heart.
If need be, adjust the tone until you feel a subtle vibration beneath your hands.
Sound once. Then again. Taking your time, never forcing.
Let each tone be an offering rather than an effort, an act of compassionate acceptance.
An act of letting go. An act of connection. The core vibration of the universe.
If grief, tenderness, or emotion arises, allow it.
If nothing arises, allow that too.
After several breaths, let the sound fade back into silence.
Rest there for a moment.
Carry what remains into the rest of your day.
©2026 Shulamit Elson