Who Has Not Grieved?

There once was a woman named Kisa Gotami whose only child died of a fever. Unable to accept this loss, she carried her dead child to the Buddha and begged him for a cure.

“I will help you,” he said, “but first bring me a mustard seed from every household that has never known death.”

She went door to door, but every family in the village had lost someone. So she returned to the Buddha, empty-handed, and said, “I could not find a household untouched by loss.”

The Buddha replied, “That is your cure.”

The moral of the story is not just that we all experience loss, but that we are always in danger of forgetting that sickness, aging, death, and separation are normal.

Instead, we assume these experiences reflect some personal failure, as if we've done something wrong. This turns sorrow to shame, leaving us feeling isolated, cast out, unworthy of care.

Our culture reinforces this illusion, suggesting that loss can be avoided with new products, new experiences, and even the steady churn of the news itself. The fantasy of perpetual newness keeps us from seeing all that keeps passing from our lives.

But what restores us to sanity is what the Francis Weller called "inter-vulnerability": the recognition that our wounds are shared, and that healing begins when we start to let ourselves be seen and held in the vulnerability of others.

Who has not grieved? No one. When we see this clearly, the heart softens and we sense a deeper love: one based not on getting or becoming, but on meeting life as it is, as it passes, with tenderness and openness.

As Jack Kerouac said: “Accept loss forever. Be submissive to everything, open, listening. No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language, knowledge. Be in love with your life.”

Where in your life are you being invited to remember that your grief is not yours alone?

Käthe Kollwitz, "In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht" (1920)