In the culture of the native North Americans, there is a custom that when someone dies, the bereaved person grieving the death goes deep into the forest and picks a tree in a certain place - it becomes their tree in their special place. With an axe, the individual cuts deeply into the trunk of the tree maybe once, or twice, or many times. The tree becomes a focus for pilgrimage, the pilgrimage of grief and sadness, and it is revisited whenever the person feels overpowered by bereavement. Gradually the wounds made by the axe heal but, for the life of the tree, the scars remain. Pain and love are intermingled and cannot ever really be separated.
Pain does seem the price that has to be paid - the pain of now is part of the happiness of then.
If you did not love the person that you remember today you would not be here and, in some way, today with all its sadness is a celebration of the love you have shared - a love that will never end. We strive to understand. We struggle to find meaning and reason for, as Viktor Frankl said, 'if we can find meaning, we are not destroyed'. And our cry may, it seems, be met with silence. Someone once wrote of their bereavement 'I am an over-sized orphan.