From the Black Pit: Grief, Love, and the Grace of Resurrection

I have pulled myself out of a black hole too many times to count.

The very first time, I was only two years old.

I fell into a pit filled with rainwater and nearly drowned before a stranger pulled me out. I wasn’t told this story until my teenage years, after sharing with my mother the recurring nightmare I had: falling into a black pit of dirty water, dragged under, gasping for air, fighting to survive. She confirmed it wasn’t just a dream. It was a memory. Interestingly, in knowing this the nightmares stopped. It was as if the confirmation was needed for the memory to be integrated fully into a lived experience. My subconscious and my body remembered.

This was my earliest memory of life: survival. And perhaps it set the tone for what was to come.

Growing Up in the Shadows

Despite this early brush with death, I remember being a happy little kid, curious and quite resilient. But life had more lessons planned. At seven, my parents divorced. My mother’s new partner moved in almost immediately. There was chaos, addictions, instability, financial collapse. My two younger brothers and I were placed in a children’s home before eventually moving to subsidized housing in what was called the “ghetto” of Iceland.

It was a colorful, often tumultuous place — a mixture of struggling families, addicts, criminals, and the broken-hearted. I was often underestimated, sometimes by teachers, often by peers. But I learned something vital: we are shaped not only by what wounds us, but also by how we choose to keep going despite it.

The Valley of the Shadow

Trauma plants seeds in our bodies. They live there, waiting, haunting, until we integrate them. Some experiences lose their power once we fold them into our story, choosing not to deny them but to understand them.

And then some traumas feel unbearable.

When I lost my husband Stefan, my partner of 28 years, I entered the valley of the shadow of death. It was my dark night of the soul. Grief hollowed me out. It stripped me of identity, tradition, and dreams. Life as I knew it was gone. I remember moments of such despair that even the will to live felt like it was slipping from me.

This is a truth we rarely name aloud: grief can make you want to stop living. Not because you are weak, but because so much of what gave life meaning has been torn away.

And yet, somewhere deep inside — maybe in the same place that once, as a toddler, fought to breathe in a pit of rainwater — there was still a flicker of life. A faint but steady instinct: Keep going. Breathe. Rise.

Resurrection Is Possible

For a year and a half, I lived in a blur. Grief lived in my body, stiff and sore, crumbling and rising, again and again. I didn’t “move on.” I simply survived — until, slowly, survival turned into something else.

This is the quiet miracle of the human spirit: we can resurrect.

Not into our old life — that is gone.

But into a new life, forged in fire and tears.

Bringing our past experiences with us into an integrated life, even more enriched by our trials, tribulations, love and meaning.

I have learned to forgive those who knew no better. To forgive myself for my own blind spots and boundaryless moments. To give grace — to myself, to others — not because it erases what happened, but because it frees me to live differently.

Some people are wired for growth. Others are wired for self-protection at any cost. We don’t need to wait for others to change before making our own choice to rise.

Grief Is Love, Transformed

Through all of this, I have discovered something grief has been whispering to me: grief is not the opposite of love. Grief is love, transformed.

To grieve is to have loved deeply.

It is proof that love existed, that it mattered, that it shaped you.

But grief is also to have lost profoundly, to hurt immensely, to feel so deeply that your very body trembles under the weight of absence. And yet — that depth of feeling is not separate from love. It is the mirror of love itself.

When we rise from grief, we are not rising against love. We are allowing love to stretch, to expand, to take on new shapes in us. Love for life. Love for living. Love for being. Love for simply existing when it felt impossible to go on.

In this way, rising becomes a mirror too — not only to the one we lost, but to our own love for life. It is an act of devotion, not denial. A choice to say: I am still here. I am still alive. And I will carry this love forward in me. Rising is, in many ways, also an act of rebellion — against a world that may expect us to crumble, against the silence that tries to swallow us whole. To rise is to defy despair itself.

At the end of the day, life is not about avoiding pain or pretending grief away. Life is about living it — through the beauty, through the devastation, through the breaking and the mending. Life is about gaining the experience of love in all its forms, and discovering in ourselves the resilience of the human spirit.

Closing Reflection

We all fall into pits in life.

Sometimes they are dug by others.

Sometimes they open suddenly beneath our feet.

And sometimes they are carved by loss so deep that we cannot see the light.

But even in the valley of the shadow of death, there is always a flicker within us — the instinct to breathe, to climb, to keep living. We are fragile beings, clinging to life in our own ways, often crawling forward when walking feels impossible. And yet, even in that fragility, there is a quiet strength that carries us on.

When we do keep going, we discover that resilience, forgiveness, and grace are not abstract virtues. They are lifelines.

Because grief is not only the proof of love. It is love itself, reshaped by loss.

To grieve is to have loved deeply. To rise is to allow that love to expand in new, unexpected directions — toward life, toward living, toward being.

Grief breaks us open, yes. But in the breaking, it also reveals the vastness of the human spirit: our ability to carry love forward, even when everything has changed.

Grief, loss, and trauma do not diminish us.

They expand us.

And even from the deepest despair, resurrection is possible.

If we let it be.