Substitutionary grief; Or why I am crying over a crushed flower, an insurance commercial, spilled milk

There are some pains that are so vast and deep you have to shy right past them and find another, smaller pain to dip into.

You have to grieve, to wail, somehow. You can’t pretend no pain exists.

But there’s self-preservation in all of us, whether we want it to be there or not. We fear losing ourselves in a void of blankness and we fear losing ourselves in sorrow so dense and specific that our very identity unravels, disintegrates in the pressure of it. So we find a neighboring sadness, a few steps down the path, and grieve some lesser thing. Substitutionary grief. It’s an outlet, an imperfect one, but something, and I guess it keeps us alive. And maybe the idea is that, given enough time and space (there we go again), we reach the point where we can open the real door and encounter the real pain and perhaps live through it. Or maybe we just lost the fear of death.