On Grief and a “Philosophical Cure”
“We do not grieve to end the grief, we grieve to remain human, to remain open to the force of love that carved the loss into us in the first place. Grief is not our enemy, it is the evidence of our capacity to care, it is the last thing we carry of them, and if we push it away, we push them away with it. We can make space for that grief and still live, we can weep and still rise, we can break and still build.”
There is a particular brutality to surviving the suicide of someone we love, especially when depression and suicidal ideation are not abstract concepts in our lives but familiar terrain, well worn, mapped in our minds in exquisite detail, maybe even lived in for far too long. When we understand that darkness intimately, when we have spent years cultivating the kind of bitter detachment that protects us from it, or worse, the romantic indulgence that lures us back into it, then their death is not simply a wound, it is an accusation. It is a mirror of our own minds. It is that insidious voice inside us whispering: "See? We were right."
But we’re still here. And that choice, because it is a choice, it is always a choice, every single fucking day, demands explanation. Not justification, not redemption, just a reason to simply not give in. And I’m not going to insult either of us with platitudes, toxic positivity or easy meaning.
There isn’t one.
The universe doesn’t owe us narrative closure. Our grief will not teach us a lesson. Their death won’t blossom into insight.
It just is.
...and that is where we have to start.
Camus and Nietzsche, far from comforting thinkers, don’t deal in softness. They do not pretend to hold our hands, but they have something else, a kind of philosophical severity that doesn’t flinch from suffering. That doesn’t try to fix or soothe it, but instead stares straight into it and asks, "Now what?"
Camus, as always, begins with the absurd, that irreconcilable tension between our demand for meaning and the universe’s stark refusal to provide it. Camus tells us to stop looking for meaning that does not, cannot, exist.
Do not lie to ourselves.
Do not soften the blow.
Instead, stare it dead in the face and choose to live in spite of it.
That is the rebellion. Not some grand heroic gesture, not triumph, nor overcoming in the traditional sense, but the daily, deliberate act of saying "NO!". No, we will not let this destroy us. No, we will not accept despair as truth. No, we will not fade away and disappear. Camus does not tell us to find hope, he tells us to become lucid. Clear eyed. Honest. Brutal in our refusal to succumb.
But that is only the beginning, because endurance, however vital, does not feel like enough. We don’t just want to survive, we want to live. To find or build something inside ourselves worth inhabiting. To make meaning, even if the universe will never provide it. And that is where Nietzsche enters.
Nietzsche does not stop at defiance. He wants transformation. He wants us to become more than we were, not less. Not diminished by our loss, but sharpened by it. We do not heal by forgetting, we become stronger by carrying the memory, by weaving it deep into ourselves, by becoming the kind of people who can withstand it and still create something powerful from it.
It is here that we find the philosophical weapon. Not a shield. A weapon. Something we can wield against despair, against nihilism as surrender, against the emptiness that creeps in at 2am and tells us nothing matters. We do not deny the emptiness. We accept it. We embrace it like an old friend, and we make something anyway.
We make a life. A life that contains grief and rage and memory and failure and loss and that leaden weight of the dead. A life that moves anyway. A life that rebels simply by continuing. A life that is ours.
We do not rebuild the person we were. That person is gone. We build someone new. And we do it in the wreckage. Laying down in its filth we do it with trembling hands. We do it while screaming at whatever "gods" are left to us. We do it while desperately and achingly longing for a person who is not coming back. We do it because we must. Because WE are still here.
And in that process, in that refusal, we find others. Not saviours. Not therapists. Not gods. Just others like us, who have also refused. Who have also chosen rebellion in the face of the absurd. Who have also built a life in the ashes.
We live not because life makes sense. We live because we are capable of making meaning where none exists. We live because we are capable of transforming pain into structure, into beauty. We live because the absurd demands nothing and we give it everything.
When the darkness returns, and it will, again and again, we meet it not with hope, but with our own presence. Not with sentiment, but with the weapon we have built inside ourselves. Not with submission, but with that relentless refusal to vanish.
This is not about getting better. This is about becoming. About becoming someone who can carry this and still move. About becoming someone who will not forget but will also not be undone. About becoming someone who can live without rescue. Someone who rescues others, not with comfort, but with companionship in revolt.
And that is how we begin to live again, not in spite of them, not without them, but with the grief fully integrated, a scar not a wound, a memory not a silence, a rebellion not a surrender.
That is the philosophical cure. That is how we go on.
And yet it is not enough to go on in silence forever, not enough to stand in defiance alone, we are not made to be sealed off, we are made in relation, in tension with others, and the deepest rebellion is not just to survive but to connect, to reach through the murk and shit of our own pain and risk being seen. Because the grief, it does not just isolate, it contorts us, wraps us so deeply in our own sorrow until we become afraid to burden others, afraid to bring our dead into the room, afraid that our sadness will unmake what little light remains. But we must speak. Not always loudly, not always with coherence, but honestly, and with the trust that others like us will recognize the shape of that silence, and step into it with their own.
We do not grieve to end the grief, we grieve to remain human, to remain open to the force of love that carved the loss into us in the first place. Grief is not our enemy, it is the evidence of our capacity to care, it is the last thing we carry of them, and if we push it away, we push them away with it. We can make space for that grief and still live, we can weep and still rise, we can break and still build.
And in that building, in the construction of something honest and scarred and real, we will find others building too, and maybe we never say it outright, maybe we never tell the whole story, but we will know each other in the effort, in the weight of the tools we carry, in the shapes of our hands marked by the same work.
This is how we endure. Not because life justifies itself, but because we make it worthy, brick by brick, in a world that offers us no blueprint, in a life that comes with no map. We choose to care again. We choose to stay, again. We choose to create again, knowing that everything we love may be lost again and again, but loving anyway. That is rebellion. That is beauty. That is life.
