Grief Finds You

If you haven’t yet been in a state of grief, this song may be hard to hear, but if you have been, or are, it’s about a certain level of truth that, difficult as it is to accept, is also calming and in a strange way reassuring. After my husband Joel’s death it was hugely helpful to me to write this song and work out my own thoughts and feelings

Grief and love are two sides of the same coin. Even if you have been fantastically lucky and the love side has come up every time you’ve flipped the coin, grief will find you.

Not that we like to think about this!

I remember visiting a royal palace in Europe where an otherwise luxurious chamber was wall-papered with dark images of dead and dying plants. I thought, how weirdly macabre! Same with monks’ cells that held nothing but a cot, a cross, and a table with a skull. Memento mori. I imagine they thought that an ever-present reminder that death will come was to encourage people to invest in their afterlife now, whether by living better, or buying indulgences, or whatever the practice was of the time. I’m not a fan of memento mori, since it puts a damper on the exuberance of life, which we really need to encourage. Still, there is something provocative in taking the long term view.

I walked into the laundry room with a basket of dirty clothes and stopped short when I saw the washing machine. I had not been in this room for days, no one else had been in the house, and the only window was shut tight. This was the washing machine:

My heart was pounding. How was this possible?

One of Joel’s cosmology colleagues came over, and I showed him the galaxies on the washer. “It has to be either air or movement,” he said, But the only window was closed, and the spin cycle had never done this before. Nor has it moved the dust galaxies in months since.

When my daughter Samara saw the photo, she laughed and reminded me that one of Joel’s favorite sayings was from Sherlock Holmes: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.“

I’ve had a ringside seat my entire adult life to the cosmological revolution that is producing humanity’s first picture of the universe that might actually be true. Dark matter and dark energy, two mysterious presences only recently discovered and not yet understood, constitute 95% of our universe. Atoms, which supposedly made up everything, are less than 5%.

It seems to me that if the prior view left us clueless about 95%, countless things may surprise us by being possible.

©2026 Nancy Ellen Abrams

I’m reading a book full of wonders

But no one’s here to share

The future’s an invisible stranger

Before me sits an empty chair

Grief finds you

Grief finds you

So many years you can put aside fears

And love in the fullness of trust

Wondrous it is, but the power’s not his

The body will do what it must

Grief finds you

Grief finds you

We had our prime, but no one defeats Time

Through one door or another, one will leave

The more you care, the more you bear

Where there’s love, someone will grieve

Interlude

Grief finds you

Grief finds you

Is it true, as Dr. Jung believed,

That with meaning even hell can be endured?

Wish I knew what it means. I’m staring at a blank screen

But there lies a purpose, if not a cure

When Grief finds you

Grief finds you