Grief is essential to life and bound inextricably to love, and when what we love is taken from us, we mourn. In the Mayan tradition, the spirits demand three offerings from their devotees: beauty, eloquence, and grief. Grief is their food, says Martín Prechtel, an author, artist, and teacher who many years ago became a full member of the Tzutujil Mayan community in Guatemala, and when they don’t get enough to eat, they get mad and start devouring humans. In The Smell of Rain on Dust, he elaborates:

“Grief is praise of those we have lost. Our own souls who have loved and are now heartbroken would turn to stone and hate us if we did not show such praise when we lose whom we love…. By the event of our uncontrolled grief, wail, and rap, we are also simultaneously praising with all our hearts the life we have been awarded to live, the life that gave us the health and opportunity of having lived fully enough to love deep enough to feel the loss we now grieve. If we do not grieve what we miss, we are not praising what we love.”

If it were only beings of the homo sapiens species that we were entitled to love, grieve, and praise, we would be poorer and simpler creatures in a diminished world. We would see our surroundings only as components of food and shelter, or tools for getting food and shelter. We would cease to marvel at songbirds, starlight, and wildflowers. We wouldn’t give names to the animals who delight us with their quirks and comfort us when we’re sad. We wouldn’t fall in love with a certain place and weep inconsolably when something harms it. We are attached to our world, and it sticks to us, spooling around us and from us, like the sticky silk strands of a spider web. Of course we love. Of course we grieve when what we love is gone. Of course we gather to remember and praise.

Let us love fully and, when the time comes, grieve fully that we may praise fully.