There are losses we know how to name.
Someone dies. There is a funeral. People bring food. They call. They say, “I’m so sorry.”
But what happens when the person you love is still alive—but far away, unreachable, estranged, changed, or simply no longer part of your life?
What happens when what you lost wasn’t a person at all?
A marriage you thought would be different. A childhood you didn’t get to have. A dream you quietly stopped pursuing. A home. A friendship. A family as it once was. A version of yourself. A future you had already imagined.
There are so many ways to lose something. And there are so many losses we learn to live around without ever really grieving.
We keep functioning. We go to work. We make dinner. We raise our children. We answer the phone. We keep going.
And sometimes we become very god at carrying on.
But carrying on isn’t necessarily the same thing as processing what happened.
Sometimes I wonder if grief doesn’t disappear simply because we become accustomed to its weight.
Maybe we just become stronger carrying it.
I’ve been thinking about what it means to approach grief rather than outrun it. Not to romanticize suffering. Not to turn every loss into a lesson. Not to rush toward gratitude. And not to tell ourselves that everything happens for a reason.
Just to tell the truth:
This mattered.
This hurt.
I loved this.
I miss this.
Something changed.
And I am still here.
Grief can be experienced through the body—a tight chest, a clenched jaw, heaviness, tears that won’t come, tears that come unexpectedly, or the exhaustion of holding something together. We don’t have to claim that grief is literally stored in a particular body part to acknowledge that loss can be deeply embodied.
Perhaps approaching grief begins with a simple question:
What have I lost?
And then a harder one:
What have I never allowed myself to mourn?
Maybe allowing grief doesn’t mean giving ourselves permission to stay forever in sorrow. Maybe it means giving sorrow somewhere to exist—a place where it doesn’t have to perform, become wisdom immediately, or make us stronger.
This may be one of the thresholds of a life well lived: not becoming untouched by loss, but becoming willing to meet it.
To name it. To grieve it. To make room for it.
And eventually, when we are ready, to ask:
“What remains?”
Not the silver lining. Not the lesson. Simply—what remains?
What love remains? What wisdom remains? What part of me remains? What can I carry forward?
Because we don’t always have to move on from what we loved.
Sometimes we learn to move forward with it.
Here are a few reflection questions approaching grief:
What have I lost?
What loss have I minimized because I told myself it wasn’t “bad enough” to grieve?
Is there someone who is still alive, but no longer accessible to me in the way I wish they were?
What version of myself am I grieving?
What have I never allowed myself to mourn?
Here are a few reflection questions allowing grief:
What happens inside me when I allow myself to remember?
What have I been trying not to feel?
What would it mean to let this grief exist without demanding that it teach me a lesson?
What remains?
What part of the love connected to this loss can I carry forward?
One gentle thing I can do after opening this grief is:
