Consider the following comments on grief.
Grief is just love with no place to go.
Anonymous
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
C. S. Lewis
Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
Joan Didion
We are taught to move on, as though sorrow were a room we could simply walk out of.
The risk of love is loss, and the price of loss is grief, but the pain of grief is only a shadow of the joy that came before.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A reflective angle is that grief is not a problem to be solved or a stage to be passed through but a form of continued love that reshapes us. Begin with a concrete moment, perhaps the strange physical sensations that accompany loss. Then resist the cultural pressure to recover quickly and to perform closure. A third movement might explore how grief changes rather than ends. Caution: avoid sentimentality and easy consolation, since the most affecting reflections sit with the discomfort rather than rushing to redeem it.