A fellow human who views life through a similar lens as mine lost his father last night. The news landed heavily in my heart this evening, perhaps because I recently had a moment of great concern about my own father's eventual transition.

How we handle the unhandleable - it's a question that brings me back to my first dance with grief.

Sometimes I think this is what shaped both my deepest fears and my most tender cares - this early lesson in love's resilience, in its stubborn persistence, outliving the very person it was meant for.

I was 3 weeks shy of my 16th birthday when I lost my boyfriend and first love in a horrendous car accident. Death took him but left me with arms full of love that had nowhere to go. The weight of it was staggering - all this tenderness with no place to land, no skin to touch, no eyes to meet.

Days after the numbness wore off, I found myself rage-filled, howling "What am I supposed to do with all of this love?"

That confusing and very complex inquiry remained a question I would live for nearly 2.5 decades, which reminds me of this profound quote I encountered in my first year of college written by Rainer Maria Rilke: 

I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

In a way only hindsight can provide, I came to see that raw-hearted sixteen-year-old girl became a woman who gripped love too tightly for nearly a decade and a half. Then, in an effort to loosen that grip once aware of its distorted nature, she overcorrected in the next decade, building walls of hyper-independence so high no love could touch her at all.

I have so much compassion for those versions of me.

Our deepest fears have a way of casting shadows on the present moment, turning down the volume of our own aliveness.

A few years ago, as I was ready to live my way into the answer of that question sparked into existence twenty-some years earlier, my spiritual journey led me to the teachings of Ram Dass. In addition to his, I was led to other voices that solidified an acceptance of death as part of life. Some of my favorite quotes are the following:

• "The beginnings and endings that you call birth and death are more about helping you to focus than anything else. But they really are illusions. You are Eternal Beings, and when you re-emerge into Non-Physical, you do not become less-than." -Abraham Hicks

• "The way you and I are connected isn't really defined by this disintegrating body. You sound just like you've always sounded. I feel like I've always felt. Your body is decaying before us, but the way you and I love each other, I just believe that love transcends death." -Ram Dass

• "In embracing death as part of life, we remember that we are more than this moment, more than our fears, and always a part of something far greater." -Zach Bush

This understanding of death as part of life rippled out into every aspect of my life sometime in my 40th year, balancing my attachment to people, ideas, outcomes, and possessions.

The process of mourning played out for me initially just as the experts say it will. But in the scheme of my life, mourning imprinted my soul and catalyzed a journey full of curiosity, awareness and growth into beautiful corners of the cosmos. It has been nothing short of magical. There was no true loss as it turns out. Only the illusion of such.

Every once in a great while, I glance up at the stars and imagine Mile as one of them. Tonight, I'll wonder which one my friend's father chose. Maybe they're swapping stories in that celestial space where love transforms to light.