🎧Give Grief a Seat
Making space for our pain
Hello wild ones,
I hope you are tending to yourself in ways that feel nourishing and supportive for you at this time of year. Our calendars can feel full during the holiday season, and it can be challenging to find pockets of time for yourself. I hope you can take a few moments to yourself to enjoy a cup of tea, read a good book, or cuddle your furry friends. This time of year can also feel very tender and challenging for those who have, and continued to, experience grief - something that isn’t often talked about, especially when everyone seems so joyful.
May this be a reminder that the holidays may not feel merry for some, and may we welcome their full humanity and meet it with care. While we enjoy the festive season with our loved ones, may we remember the tender hearts of those who are aching and acknowledge the elephant in the room - it helps to carry the load together. And may we move gently, with compassion and kindness for ourselves and all those we cross paths with and remember the importance of connection - a lifeline for many.
Below is a personal essay in which I share one of my experiences with grief. You may read my words or listen to me speak them, whichever is your preference. My hope is that you find comfort in these words and that you feel understood, because you make sense. And most importantly, I hope it supports you in cultivating compassion within yourself for your process with grief.
Go gently,
Laurita
I didn’t leave the house for an entire week.
The couch became my bed, the tv left on, and a coffee table scattered with empty wrappers of ice cream bars that I binged on was my melancholic reality for weeks after I heard the news. Day in and day out, I was stuck horizontal, unable to do anything but use the bathroom when my bladder could no longer bear the pressure. I struggled to bathe, I was barely eating, and I spent most of the day researching on my phone, “Is there an afterlife?” Spoiler alert, there is apparently, depending on your beliefs. I was desperate to hang onto any sliver of hope that I could get my hands on that told me I could still connect with my loved one, to still stay tethered, somehow, after such a sudden unexpected departure.
Days passed and my google searches switched from hope of an afterlife to a rabbit hole of medical jargon, feeling angry that we had no answers and were just left to somehow accept the finality of this death. He was just gone, in an instant, and our family was reeling in pain - just like we did only six years prior.
Two sisters have now lost a child, how could this happen, again, in our family? We were still not, and never will be, over the first loss and there we were again facing the unbearable pain of losing another cherished family member. Another branch from our tree, broken off. Nothing made sense, except the utter disbelief, then the anger.
You never forget the day, or the moment, you get the news. It was a Tuesday (here in Australia) for me and I had spent the morning on client calls, followed by an afternoon appointment with my osteopath to work out some kinks in my back. I went for a walk on the beach afterwards, it was an overcast day and the ocean was moody, which I preferred. Halfway through my walk I felt a strong urge to write, something inside of me just needed to move onto the page, so I pulled out my phone and quickly typed some thoughts that were swirling through my brain into my notes app before they whisked away as fast as they came rolling into my mind. I had no clue just how much I would end up needing those very words in the next coming weeks.
I drove home from the beach, had dinner at home with my partner, and we spent the evening enjoying each other’s company - laughing, talking about our days, and taking the neighbours dog for an evening stroll around the block. My partner went off to bed before me as I needed to finish up some late-night work in preparation for a workshop I was facilitating the following morning. It was getting late and I went to the bathroom to wash my face and get ready for bed, my phone was on the counter, face up.
As I was putting on my moisturizer, I noticed my phone lighting up and on the screen it displayed “Home”, it was my parents calling. I stopped, mid lotion lather, and my stomach immediately felt sick. They didn’t call often, and certainly not at 11:00pm - we’ve become really good at translating time zones, and they knew it was late for me, and I knew something was wrong. I ignored the call, I wasn’t ready for what I was about to hear. I finished putting my lotion on, brushed my teeth, and gave myself five minutes of naivety before calling back.
My Mum answered, which I wasn’t expecting. Usually, it was my Dad who made these kinds of phone calls. She immediately assured me that my Dad was okay, she knew I would be concerned given his health decline since his ICU admission. She was okay, my brothers were okay. And then, through a cracked and quiet voice she said, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but Sean passed away.” I fell to the ground, crying, and I kept yelling out “What happened, what happened?”
My partner woke up to my screams and came rushing out the bedroom. He sat next to me, rubbing my back, knowing something had happened, but was only hearing my end of the phone call while I kept asking my Mum for details, for answers - something she couldn’t possibly provide, and something we never did end up getting.
Nothing prepares you for grief. It rushes in like an unexpected tsunami and violently wipes you off your feet, leaving you suspended in air unable to touch back down, at least for a little while. The days and weeks that followed were a mixed bag of experiences - one minute dissociated and numb, the next nauseated and crying on the floor unable to breathe. Leaving the house was impossible for the first week, and when I finally had to exit my grief cave to get groceries, the first human I interacted with was the lovely and friendly store clerk who, with a cheerful smile, politely wished me a great day - and that’s when I knew things would feel a lot worse before they would feel a little okay again.
After such great loss, how do we simply return to life again, and be expected to function as we previously did before our hearts broke apart? How do we sit and chat with friends at a birthday party pretending we aren’t carrying the heaviest invisible knapsack on our aching back? And how do we walk around town wearing a smile from ear to ear, one just like that friendly store clerk had, continuing to move onwards with life’s tasks as if our entire world doesn’t feel like it has simply stopped dead in its tracks?
Put simply, we don’t.
We don’t return, we don’t pretend, and we don’t just move on. We cannot return to our previous grief free days because we aren’t the same anymore, how could we be after such loss?
Grief, a wild traverse that all of us will inevitably come face to face with at some point in our lives, some of us earlier than expected, is a journey that brings us to the most potent edges within ourselves; the ones we aren’t familiar with - a terrifying descent. Some of us may push onwards and choose to remain busy as a means of coping, others may shut down and become flat and unable to participate in life - either way, pain is at the forefront. And what does pain beg of us? Presence.
But we live in a grief-illiterate society - one that doesn’t understand it, one that doesn’t teach us the importance of the process, and one that is uncomfortable discussing any of it - a recipe for dissociation. I remember breaking down in tears one day when another grief wave rolled in, unexpectedly, and a friend, although well-meaning, said “They’re in a better place now.” “Are they?” I thought. When I would openly share about my loss, others would ask, “Were you two close?” As if some metric value somehow validates, or invalidates, my grief.
Some people freeze at the first mention of loss, but grief is woven into every fabric of our lives, whether we acknowledge it or not. Our ability to meet grief is a reflection of our capacity to let love in. And grief isn’t only limited to physical loss through death, but also the many layers of living grief that exist - separation, change, transitions, for example.
We aren’t taught how to actually meet grief, hold rituals for grief, or hold space for another when they are going through it. We’ve forgotten how sacred grief really is, because grief, by nature, is vital to living. It is wild and alive, just like the landscapes we live upon - breathing, moving, cyclical. And it’s one of the greatest initiations into our very own human-ness. Society glorifies strength and resiliency and loves the hero’s journey. Who doesn’t love a good happy ending story? I do. But if that’s all we focus on and place value upon, it evades the very experience of what it means to be human, what it means to be alive.
Grief asks much of us; to welcome it like we would a guest for tea. It asks that we give it a seat at our table. To give it space, to give it air time. To acknowledge it in its entirety. We may cry, we may rage, we may question - all a sacred part of the journey, a necessary unraveling. Grief doesn’t ask us to conceptualize one's departure, it invites us to drop into our hearts and feel every inch of pain and then even more so, to make space for love to grow around it.
No one wants to grieve, but we all want to love.
No one wants to rest, but we all want to feel nourished.
And no one wants to feel the messy bits of what it means to be human, but we all want to be on the other side of our pain having arrived unscathed and “healed.”
An inconvenient paradox.
The truth is, we don’t heal grief. We integrate it into the woven tapestry of our full spectrum life, and it becomes a treasured thread that reflects the full spectrum love that we will forever hold. When we welcome grief in just like our other guests, joy and love, we give it a seat at our communal table and see what it has to say - some days grief may have nothing to share, other days maybe it needs our undivided attention for a while. Either way, it's invited. Grief still shows up for me even all these years later, sometimes in the most unexpected moments, and when it does I whisper, “You’re welcome here at the table, too.”
On that overcast, moody ocean day while walking along the beach, hours before getting the call that informed me that he died, these are the words I urgently wrote on my phone, just a mere 16 minutes after he took his last breath. These are the words I didn’t know I would need, but somehow, in some way, maybe I did know.
“Grief isn’t meant to be fixed, rushed, or worse, dismissed.
It is meant to be held in its entirety.
Held by ourselves, and more importantly, held with others.
No matter how long we may need to honour our process.
And even then, grief lives on forever, because so does love.” - Laurita
Thank you for being here, with me. This time of year can feel tender and difficult for those holding grief, so go gently with yourself, and with others. Below are some questions for inquiry to reflect on your own journey with grief, and you are welcome to share in the comments what comes up for you - all of you is welcome here.
Laurita
Some Questions for Inquiry:
What is your relationship like with grief?
How do you experience grief throughout the holiday season?
What supports you in honouring the grief and your loved one?
As always, I am grateful for your presence here and for your continued support in my work. I invite you to share this essay with anyone whom you feel will resonate with my words. We are all in this, wildly unraveled life, together.
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Thank you for writing about your grief. I lost my daughter on June 16, 2023, and I am struggling in a way I never knew was possible. She was at work, and suddenly she dropped on her desk and was instantly gone.
So many unanswered questions and so much to say but all buried within my heart for now.
I miss my daughter every moment of my day and night. I hear her voice, her laughter and the most endearing way she would call me “Ma”.
I am so sorry for your loss. There is no way to fill the void left behind. Grief is unbearable and beyond painful. May we all find peace in this shared loss and grief.
This is such a beautiful ode to grief. As someone who has lived through and been reshaped by loss and grief, I find in you a kindred soul. Today my soul work is simply to hold sacred space for the grieving so that they can be their messiest, most human selves. Thank you for sharing your tender heart ❤️