When Love Always Knows Where To Go

A reflection by Kinyatta E. Gray

You have heard it said that grief is love with nowhere to go.

I have heard it too. And with the greatest respect for the pain that gave that phrase its life — that has never been my experience.

My love has always known where to go.

It went into the memoir I wrote so my mother could finally hold a published book — through my hands, in her honor, with her name on every page that mattered. It went into the greeting cards I designed for women who needed someone to say the words the world had stopped saying. It went into the affirmation decks and the sanctuary soaks and the ritual kits — every product a love letter to a woman who taught me what tending looked like before I knew I was being taught.

My love went into the music. Into Mama's Girl and Mama I'm Outside and every lyric I wrote in the quiet hours when missing her was loudest. It went into the podcast episodes and the blog posts and the Pink Chair conversations — every word an act of loving her by loving the women she would have loved.

My love goes into the sun when it hits my face a certain way and I feel — without explanation and without apology — that it is her. It goes into my grandson's face where I see everything she planted still growing. It goes into the garden I tend and the bee bling I wear and the yellow Miss Bee Mobile that carries her name through the world.

My love has never been homeless.

It has been the most well-traveled thing I own.

Perhaps the grief that feels like love with nowhere to go belongs to those who have not yet found the sacred and creative and living ways to keep directing it. And that is not a judgment, that is an invitation. Because love after loss does not have to stall at the graveside. It does not have to accumulate in the chest with no outlet. It can be redirected. Intentionally. Beautifully. Into everything you build and tend and create and become in the name of the person who is no longer here but has never — not for a single moment — stopped being loved.

Miss Bee has somewhere to go every single day.

She goes into everything I do.

And I would not have it any other way.

~ Kinyatta

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