Grief is the price we pay for love.

A quote a friend reminded me of when my father passed away in 2013 and brought me some comfort.

The Queen poignantly said this in a speech after 9/11 and it originally comes from a longer passage by Colin Murray Parkes:

“The pain of grief is just as much part of life as the joy of love: it is perhaps the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment. To ignore this fact, or to pretend that it is not so, is to put on emotional blinkers which leave us unprepared for the losses that will inevitably occur in our own lives and unprepared to help others cope with losses in theirs.”

I take an additional meaning from this, which is that, when we grieve, it shows the depth of the love we had, our respect for those people and the impact they had on our lives.

Something to be celebrated.