Excerpt from Grieving Mindfully

Suffering can bring you to a place of profound mindfulness about your relationships and your spiritual beliefs.  In the context of grief, the person, and by extension the relationship, can be your spiritual teacher. Being aware of how your loved one lived, what his or her role was in your life, and how you are experiencing the loss of that person can turn your grief journey into a vehicle for your spiritual growth. Without this person's presence in and loss from your life, you would not have this unique opportunity to appreciate life and love, and seek out personal growth.

Using the pain of loss as a spiritual teacher, you begin to cultivate a sense of gratitude toward what you are feeling and experiencing. The intense emotional pain of your grief may still hurt. However, as you experience grief mindfully, allowing yourself to feel the twists and turns of the spiral staircase, the triggers and changes in your relationships, and your own personal development, you may eventually come to realize, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, perhaps even physically, that your capacity to grieve - and your capacity to love - are interconnected.