Welcome to Grief Unfolding
What Does Grief Look Like When Mourning Ends?
Are you interested in the evolution of grief? In the ways that rawness and pain can make way for wonder, emotional capacity, and wholeness? Do you choose the pathway of authenticity, even when it requires sitting with pain?
If so, this is your space.
Our culture has grief all wrong. We approach it (if we can’t find a way to avoid it!) with something like caution, fear, or even distaste. It scares us, makes us uncomfortable, interrupts the flow of what we would rather be doing. The message is that we should be able to wrap grief up as quickly as possible and move back into the typical routine of life. It’s as though the goal is to remain as untouched as possible by those experiences in life with the potential to help us become deeply human.
One of the most common complaints I hear as a grief therapist is that my clients feel abandoned by their people. I experienced the same thing in my personal life. Friends who I expected would support me in pain slipped out of my life, compounding the levels of loss and mourning.
Worse yet, we may even abandon ourselves in grief, by pushing away the feelings that seem too big to sit with.
That approach underestimates the nature of grief.
After my husband died seven years ago, I wrote about early grief—the rawness and intensity, the ferocity of that pain. Many people resonated with those words, corresponded with me, and followed my blog.
Then I took a break from writing.
I needed to sit with what all of it meant for me. Did I want to write about grief forever? I knew that I could not stay with my experience of grief, in that form, indefinitely. I also knew that I couldn’t just move on from it either. I was changing in fundamental ways. Grief was rewriting me in ways I couldn’t yet articulate.
The answer I am growing into is that grief is an unfolding. When processed, held, and honored, it becomes an opening of heart, mind and experience. And the question I am growing into is this: What does it look like as mourning resolves, but grief continues? What happens when grief becomes less about bracing, rawness and emptiness, and more about the beauty of the space that has been created?
I have heard it said that all therapy is grief therapy. We grieve not only obvious losses like the death of a loved one. We grieve for unmet expectations, for hopes that don’t materialize, for opportunity cost and the times the world falls short of our ideals. We grieve abstract yet profound losses—versions of ourselves we never became, relationships that could not be repaired, and moments of safety, belonging, or innocence that were interrupted or never fully formed.
Learning to dance with grief instead of to fight or avoid it is a radical act of trust in self and source in this world of constant change.
Seven years ago, I wrote about my late husband’s dying insights, when weak and exhausted, he struggled to finish the sentence, “This is the meaning. . .” The meaning he discovered was love.
The more I am able to dance with grief the more capacity I have for all the manifestations of what love is. When I try to rush, compartmentalize, or escape from grief, the result is emptiness.
This substack is a space for grief. And for love. If you are interested in conversation about what grief looks like in evolution, it is also a space for you.
Welcome.
For deepening practices linked to the ideas in this post, see the companion post here.
