Eros and Thanatos: Love & Grief
As a child, I was surrounded by spirits. In my grandmother’s house, I would stare into old photographs and feel in my body what had happened to the people in them. Before long, I would ask:
“What happened to this person?”
Her answers came without hesitation, delivered almost casually:
– Car accident.
– Overdose.
The words were simple, stripped of drama. They settled into me like small, undeniable truths. My child’s mind would nod in agreement, “Yes, that makes sense!”, and then I would return to my drawing books and colored pencils.
Only later did the question rise up in me: Why do people treat death with such heaviness and despair?
For me, love and death carried a similar vibration. Both felt charged with an energy of peace and serenity. Yet what I encountered in the world was fear, sorrow, and silence. As life unfolded, I came to understand that death was not only biological. Living people, too, could die for me, not through accidents or illness, but through separation, estrangement, the fractures that life inevitably brings.
This is how I learned that love and loss, life and death, cannot be separated. They are the contract we are born into. And yet, as a culture, we resist this truth. We treat death as if it were a problem to be fixed rather than a reality to be lived with. We talk about the dead as if they belong to another realm entirely, forgetting that they continue to exist within us, in our memories, in our bodies, in the stories that shape us. What we rarely confront is our own mortality, our own extinction.
We imagine grief begins with death, but it begins much earlier. Grief begins with love. It begins the moment we realise that something precious cannot last: a person, a pet, a dream, a way of life. Knowing it will end is where grief takes root.
Freud gave names to the two forces at play here: Thanatos, the death instinct, and Eros, the life instinct. They are not enemies but two sides of the same coin.
Thanatos enters when something ends. Sometimes he slips in quietly, other times chaotically, and occasionally even with relief. He is the instinct that turns us inward, that makes us cling to familiar pain rather than risk hope or joy. But when we block pain, we also block joy.
Pain, then, is not the adversary. It is the portal. Paradoxically, only by feeling pain do we heal. Pain is the agent of change. Our task is not to exile Thanatos, but to let him do his work, and then to find our way back to Eros.
Wherever Thanatos lingers, Eros is close by. Releasing pain creates space to connect again, to imagine, to love.
Together, Eros and Thanatos weave through every life. We cannot choose one without the other. And we cannot navigate them alone. When someone dies, it is through the love of others that we relearn how to live, that we dare to love again.
Grieving is not a detour from life. It is the work of life itself. To refuse it is to close ourselves off from living fully. Pain is the messenger, reminding us that something has changed and we must change too.
Grief is not simply a feeling. It is a form of learning. Our bodies know how to adapt, how to integrate new realities, if we let them. And in time, there comes that fragile but undeniable moment of recognition:
Life as we knew it is gone.
A new life is waiting.
And we must change too.
May this journey through love and loss guide us back to life, again and again.
With love,
Sofia