Grief is a bridge between love and memory

When the weeping is done, rise and build

Let me talk to you about grief.

It is the visitor no one invites and everyone receives. It arrives without knocking, sits down without permission, and stays longer than we want. We have been taught to fear it, to hide from it, to hurry it out the door. We have been taught that grief is a weakness, a disruption, something to be overcome so that life can return to normal. But grief is not a disruption of life. Grief is life, insisting on being felt. And until we feel it, it does not leave. It waits.

Strip it down. What is grief, really?

Grief is love that has lost its object. It is the hand that still reaches for the phone to call the one who is no longer there. It is the meal that tastes wrong because someone is missing from the table. It is the song that brings tears because it was her favourite. Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is a wound to be honoured. And the wound will not heal by being ignored. It heals by being acknowledged, by being carried, by being given permission to exist.

The ancestors understood this. They did not hide grief. They built rituals around it. The mourning period was not a burden; it was a container. The wailing was not a loss of control; it was a release. The community gathered not to distract the bereaved, but to sit with them in the pain. The dead were not forgotten; they were welcomed into the circle of ancestors. Grief was the bridge between love and memory. It was not the end of the relationship. It was the beginning of a different one.

The modern world has lost this wisdom. We are told to move on, to get over it, to be strong. We are given three days of bereavement leave and then expected to return to work as if nothing has changed. We are told that tears are weakness, that sadness is a failure, that the past should be left behind. This is not strength. This is avoidance. And avoidance does not heal grief. It buries it. And what is buried does not die. It waits, and it returns, often in forms we do not recognise—anger, bitterness, illness, numbness, the slow death of the ability to feel.

The sovereign response to grief is not to run from it. It is to sit with it. To name it. To allow it. To pour libation for the one who is gone and to speak their name aloud. To tell the story of what they meant. To let the tears come when they come, and to know that tears are not weakness. They are the body’s way of releasing what the heart can no longer hold.

Grief has no timeline. It does not obey the calendar. It returns on birthdays, on anniversaries, on ordinary Tuesdays when a scent or a sound or a memory suddenly opens the wound again. This is not regression. This is the nature of love. The goal is not to stop grieving. The goal is to learn to carry the grief alongside the life—not as a burden that crushes, but as a weight that grounds, that reminds us of what mattered, that keeps the dead present in the living.

And here is what the ancestors knew that we have forgotten: grief is not only for the dead. It is also for the living. We grieve lost homes, lost languages, lost ways of life. We grieve the Ghana that was promised and never arrived. We grieve the childhood we did not have. We grieve the person we might have become. This grief is real, and it is not a weakness. It is the beginning of repair. A nation that cannot grieve its losses cannot heal them. A people that cannot mourn its wounds cannot bind them. The repair of Ghana begins with the courage to grieve what has been lost—and then, having grieved, to rise.

So I ask you today: What are you grieving? Not the polite answer. The real one. The person you lost. The dream that died. The home that changed. The self you left behind. Name it. Feel it. Pour libation for it. Speak its name. And know that in the naming, the healing begins.

And the second question: What grief is the nation refusing to feel? The grief of the extraction economy that stole our wealth. The grief of the examination cage that stole our children’s curiosity. The grief of the environment under assault. The grief of the colonised mind. Until we mourn what has been taken, we cannot build what must come.

Grief is not the enemy. It is the door. The coloniser taught us to hide from it, to be strong in the wrong way, to bury our pain under productivity and pride. The ancestors knew better. They knew that tears water the soil of the future. Grieve. Pour libation. Speak the names. And then, when the weeping is done, rise and build. The repair begins in the heart that has allowed itself to feel.

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I. Ras Gad Shangox owned and operated a Taxi in Toronto for 28 years before 2016 when he sold his plate and became licensed as a delivery truck driver. His series “Pocket Wisdom for Sovereign Minds” was born of his curiousity about the relationship between individual words and their impact on human consciousness and behaviour. Shangox’ writing is founded upon his original ideas and then polished with AI.