I drive home from a massage and I cry.

I feel the cut of my daughter's words, unmeant, and I cry.

A song on the radio, sweeps me back into old car journeys, old kitchen clatter, and I cry.

My husband tells me that thing about a dog being a chapter in our lives, but for them we're the whole book. And I cry.

I walk my hound on the beach, watch her hunt and pull and scamper. I take a few breaths cold and deep, and, smiling, I cry.

I watch a genocide projected from the palm of my hand - the devastation of mothers and children - and I cry. And I cry.

Grief draws closer it seems as time goes on. It doesn't ache so much anymore, not in that breathtaking, crumpling way. But it melts out into every corner of life, every crack and pause. Every moment now has another possibility. The could have beens and should have beens. The never was, never could be. This is bittersweet: that alternate life, the reflection in the window, is how I keep her close.

The tears are sweet and welcome, reassuring even. And they mingle with the tears of other griefs, other injustices, that do not sweeten with time. Those tears remind me I am human and wash my heart with resolve to live like one.

It is heroic to love from a broken heart, and I think my mother did this. I was loved, and there was so much loving and living yet for the both of us. I think this life, this time of living, asks us all to learn to love from heartbreak, and we might trust there is a ferocity, a vitality, a necessity in living this way. There is more loving and living for all of us.

Pema Chödrön, Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher, wrote a book called ‘When Things Fall Apart’. I lend copies to clients, I gift it to friends. It is deep companionship for broken-hearted times. One of the many gems:

‘We don’t set out to save the world; we set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people’s hearts.’

This is the least and the most we can do.

Tend to your heart, tend to the hearts of others, tend to every kind of heart.

You are loved. Keep going.