Grief is not only about death.
It has entered my life through many other doors: divorce, illness, moving to another country, losing a job, dreams that died, friendships that quietly came to an end.
I have mourned all kinds of losses.
People who are still alive.
Parts of my life that ended far too soon and caught me completely unprepared.
With each loss, I also had to grieve the versions of myself that disappeared alongside them.
Because my identity had been built around those people and those things.
I knew who I was in relationship to them.
And when they were gone, I was left wondering who I was without them.
Some of those losses hurt almost as much as death itself.
The only difference was that there was no funeral.
No one came carrying flowers to say goodbye.
I’ve come to realize that many of the struggles people bring into therapy are, in truth, forms of unfinished grief.
Sometimes I didn’t even realize I was grieving.
When I lost a relationship, I didn’t only lose the person.
I also lost the future I had imagined with them.
An entire life I had already begun living in my mind.
When I lost a dream, I didn’t only lose the person I might have become.
I also lost the meaning I had attached to that dream.
Suddenly, I no longer knew what I was moving toward.
I’ve also mourned the childhood I never had.
The safe home.
The unconditional love.
My innocence.
Lost time.
The parts of myself I buried without ever truly feeling them because survival came first.
Some losses remained inside me for years without a name.
I felt them in my body.
In the way I clung to things outside myself.
In my fear of losing again.
In my need to keep everything under control.
Only much later did I realize that this, too, was grief.
Grief is one of the most paradoxical emotional experiences we have.
Love and loss are sisters.
One cannot exist without the other.
The deeper we love, the greater our capacity to lose.
I remember how many times I swore I would never love again.
That I would never trust people again.
And yet I kept loving.
I kept hoping.
To me, that is one of the bravest things human beings do.
We know love is temporary.
Borrowed.
Fragile.
Risky.
And still, the heart opens again.
“We are wounded in relationships, and we heal in relationships.”
There is no life without loss.
We will lose people, love, dreams, places, identities, and versions of ourselves over and over again.
The opposite of pain is numbness.
But numbness is not healing.
It comes at a tremendous cost.
Because when I closed the door to pain, I also closed the door to joy.
And to every other emotion.
I cannot choose to stop feeling only what hurts.
Eventually, I stop feeling anything at all.
There were moments when freezing my grief was the only way I could survive.
But every frozen loss eventually found me again.
One by one, I unpacked them.
Again.
And again.
The purpose of grief was never to make me forget.
Nor to help me “move on.”
Its purpose was to help me move through.
To fully feel the loss.
The absence.
The emptiness that remained.
To integrate what had happened.
To keep living without abandoning myself.
I’m still not finished grieving.
Some losses still come back to visit me.
Others have become scars.
Sometimes I think a loss has finally settled.
Then I hear a song.
Catch a familiar scent.
Walk into a certain place.
And the grief rises again, wave after wave.
Grief does not move in a straight line.
It circles back.
It changes shape as I change.
The things I lost at twenty hurt differently now.
Because I understand them differently.
Because the woman I am today sees the young woman I once was with greater tenderness and clarity.
Healing does not mean that I no longer feel the loss.
It begins when I stop fighting the fact that I lost something.
When I stop rushing to fix myself.
When I can sit beside my pain without trying to push it away.
Grief will always live in my heart.
But it will hurt in different ways, depending on what grows around it.
Sometimes it will return like a panic button.
Other times it will ache quietly in the background.
I don’t think it will ever disappear.
Life will simply keep growing around it.
New people will come.
New meaning will emerge.
I will discover parts of myself that could never have existed without everything I lost.
The pain will remain.
But it will no longer occupy all the space.
For me, grief is deeply connected to shame.
Shame tells me to hide what hurts.
To stay silent.
To stop talking.
To stop grieving so intensely.
To move on more quickly.
Grief asks me to turn inward and look directly at what I’ve lost.
And beneath toxic shame, I often find an old grief that was never allowed to be mourned.
The grief for the love I never received.
For the relationship I deserved.
For the protection that never came.
For the part of me that learned to disappear just to stay close to others.
Perhaps some wounds begin to heal only when we finally allow ourselves to say:
It mattered.
It hurt.
I have the right to grieve for as long as I need.