“Grief is a threshold emotion”

Lisbeth White, author of “A Most Natural Thing: An Elemental Memoir,” was featured at the October poetry reading and open mic at the Bainbridge Island Public Library in Bainbridge Island, Washington last week. She looked familiar to me, but it was she who reminded me how we met. I’d attended a poetry workshop she had taught at Bloedel Preserve. I was still deeply in the grief of losing my husband and best friend.  And she remembered. It had been two years! When home, I pull her book off my shelf and see this underlined: “Grief is a threshold emotion. Meaning, it is an emotion that carries its own opposite within it. We only experience loss to the degree we experience connection to what we have lost…We only experience grief to the degree we have experienced love.”  To which I say, Amen. And a special thanks to Lisbeth for her kind remembering.