Healing after loss does not mean loving less.

People sometimes resist feeling better, as though recovery were a betrayal and the pain were the last remaining proof of love. It is not. Healing changes what the love does with itself; it stops being an open wound and becomes something you can carry into the rest of your life. The person is not honored by your suffering. They are honored by your remembering.

If you notice yourself holding on to the pain deliberately, ask what you are afraid would disappear without it. Then find another way to keep that thing, a ritual, a story, a habit of theirs you continue. Love kept in practice outlasts love kept in pain.