What If Grief Isn’t the Enemy?
Whether you’ve recently lost someone you love or you’re carrying a loss that happened ten years ago, grief has a way of showing up uninvited. It barges in like a houseguest you never asked for and certainly don’t know how to host. One moment you’re “fine,” and the next you’re in the cereal aisle sobbing over a box of Cheerios because your person used to eat them every morning. Grief doesn’t care about timing. It has no respect for schedules or social norms. It just… shows up. Rude. I know.
And when it does show up, most of us panic. We shove it down, try to distract ourselves, pretend it’s not there, or berate ourselves for “still” feeling it. We treat grief like a problem to solve, something to get over or around or under, anything but through.
But what if, stay with me here, grief has just gotten a bad rap?
What if grief feels so awful, not because it’s inherently wrong or broken, but because no one ever taught you how to do it?
Think about it. If someone handed you a sewing machine and told you to make a ball gown right now or you’d lose everything, you’d understandably freak out. You don’t know how to sew. You don’t know how to cut patterns or hem fabric or thread a bobbin (what even is a bobbin?). It’s not that you’re incapable, it’s just that no one ever showed you how.
Grief is a lot like that. It’s a skill. A practice. A part of life that we somehow expect ourselves to know how to do naturally, even though most of us have had zero preparation. And to make it worse, our culture tends to treat grief like it’s contagious, something to politely look away from or speed through with a tidy casserole and a card that says, “Thinking of you.”
But here’s the truth: No one gets out of this human experience alive. Loss is inevitable. Which means grief is, too.
So instead of avoiding it, or fearing it, what if you learned how to grieve?
What if you allowed yourself to be with grief the way you might sit with a dear friend going through something hard? With patience. With tenderness. Without the need to fix it. Or the need to run away from it.
Grief is not the enemy. It’s not a malfunction. It’s not a failure of resilience. It’s not useless. Grief is what love looks like after loss. It’s the ache of absence. It’s the indent on their favorite chair of where they used to sit. It’s the fragrance of their perfume once they’ve vacated the room. It’s the honoring of what was, and the reshaping of what is.
Grief is your heart expanding to hold both the love and the loss. It’s not a problem to solve, but a space to inhabit. And more importantly, it’s often in this hollowed empty space that we begin to find our healing. In the emptiness, something else can arrive, wisdom, clarity, compassion, aliveness, love.
Grief is part of the natural world, just like the tides and the trees and the sun setting quietly every evening. It doesn’t need to be resisted. It needs to be understood. Felt. Moved through with grace (or at the very least, with honesty and some tissues).
So maybe the question isn’t how do I get over this, but rather, how do I learn to be with this in a way that I live a lively life?
Because if grief is the cost of loving, then maybe, just maybe, it’s also the path back to living.