I’ve experienced several reversals of late. So have you, or you will. If nothing else, I’ve learned to embrace the grief that attends the trouble that visits us all.
Irrespective of its origin, grief focuses you in a way that success and failure cannot. Success brings joy and esteem, while 
failure, though often instructive, brings mainly ordinary disappointment and frustration. Grief, however, forces you to take stock of yourself. It prods you to re-examine the person you are and the person you want to be. It impels honest evaluation and, more often than not, spurs change.
Grief feels terrible, obviously, but it has magic power. Its presence is proof that you care about things, that you still, somehow, have love in your heart even if you’ve been too harried or distracted to notice.
Grief is nothing short of the spirit of God, or the internal bubbling of the collective unconscious or whatever you call the essence of what binds us and all the beasts of the earth to one another.
Grief is a gift.
I don’t wish upon you the inevitable heartache that conjures grief but, at the same time, I would never wish away the resultant grief, either. Grief is the signal that life is worth living, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.
Well said.
A friend once said at the funeral of a former coach, to a circle of sobbing football coaches, “if it didn’t hurt, it didn’t mean anything.”
I’ve never forgotten that line.
Now, years later, it’s got a place to be used to illustrate another point.
I’ve just gone through exactly what you talk about, John! Very thoughtful and well written!
well said and so true….in my experience….