How We STAY with Grief

I want to tell you something that took me an embarrassingly long time to learn, and I say that as someone with a doctorate in psychology. We are allowed to feel more than one thing at a time. I know. It sounds obvious when you say it out loud. And yet most of us were never actually taught this. Not in school, not in our families, not in the cultural scripts we absorbed about how emotions are suppo...

Someone out there right now is sitting in the sunshine feeling terrible and wondering what is wrong with them. Summer has this particular cultural pressure baked into it. The assumption that longer days and warmer weather translate directly into better moods, more energy, more presence, more joy. Especially if you live somewhere that is grey and wet for most of the year and summer arrives like a c...

There is a particular kind of grief that arrives without a ritual. No funeral. No casserole. No bereavement leave. No sympathy card. No moment where the people around you pause what they are doing and acknowledge that something significant has happened to you. This grief shows up quietly, often without a name, and it lives in the body alongside everything else you are expected to keep doing. It do...

I want to tell you something I don’t talk about very often. I am living in heart failure. Right now, today, as I write this. My ejection fraction sits around 38%. I take fifteen pills a day. I struggle to regulate my body temperature in the heat. By the end of most days I am genuinely exhausted in a way that doesn’t fully resolve with sleep. And if you passed me on the street, you would have absol...

When we talk about slowing down in grief, most people picture the same thing. Someone who is moving too fast. Cleaning out closets three days after a loss. Making major decisions before the shock has even lifted. Staying relentlessly busy because stillness feels unbearable. That is one kind of grief. It is real and it is common. But it is not the only way grief shows up. Some grievers don’t speed...

I hear a version of this almost every week, both in my office and out in the world. Someone is struggling, really struggling, and they say something like, “I don’t know why I’m still so sad. It’s been a year.” Or, “I feel like I should be over this by now.” Or my personal favorite, “It’s not like someone died.” Here is what I have come to understand after more than a decade of clinical work in gri...

Someone tells you they are grieving. Maybe they say it directly. Maybe it comes out sideways, in a comment about not sleeping well or feeling off or just not being themselves lately. And something in you immediately wants to help. So you say something. You offer the reframe, the silver lining, the name of a therapist, the reminder that they are strong. You say things like “at least” and “they woul...

Can I tell you what grief panic looks like in real life? It looks like cleaning out a closet three days after a loss because you cannot stand to look at it anymore. It looks like researching “how long does grief last” at two in the morning, doom scrolling on your phone. It looks like making decisions about relationships, jobs, and living situations in the first weeks of a loss because doing someth...

Early in my clinical work, I used to tell clients that grief gets better. I stopped saying it. Not because it is never true, but because it was setting people up to measure their grief against a finish line that does not actually exist. Most grief frameworks we have inherited, the stages, the tasks of mourning, the neatly mapped timelines, are built around the idea that grief has a destination. Th...