One of my mother-in-law’s dearest friends, Mona, a wonderful and eccentric woman who happens to be a former nun, commented to Andrew, when she learned of our close friend’s recent death, “grief is the tax for loving.” I appreciated her intention. Taxes are the price we pay for many of the services we take for granted. So taxes can be seen as a contribution toward certain privileges, and grief and sorrow can be seen as our contribution to the process of staying open to love and deep connection to others and ourselves.
No doubt our human experience is full of the paradoxical truth that we can’t fully experience joy unless we are open to pain any more than we can know light without darkness or silence without sound. Allowing ourselves to open up to loving deeply means we allow the possibility of losing that beloved person (or animal) in some way. I remember when I fell in love with Andrew, and we had committed to a life together–I told him he had to let me die first. Of course I knew that I had no control over the timing of either of our passing, but, joking aside, opening up to loving him as deeply as I had made me aware of how terrible the loss would be if he died.
Getting back to Mona, though the experience of grief and loss may feel like a tax for loving, as if we have to pay back for the good we’ve been blessed with, our “tax bracket” is determined by our willingness to be fully emotionally present to all of our experience. Living with an open heart means accepting life as a package deal, and the highest price we pay is the limited life of one who refuses to embrace it all.
