What Grief Knows That the Mind Does Not
Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is a kind of attention — a final act of love. Notes from sitting with what we have lost.
Tasha Darwent
Integrative Health Coach
We have, in our culture, an almost panicked relationship with grief. We give it a week of bereavement leave. We send a casserole. We say the words about closure and stages and moving on. And then we expect — quietly, but firmly — that the person who is grieving will reassemble themselves into the shape they were before.
Grief does not do that. Grief is not a project.
Grief is what love looks like when it has nowhere else to go.
The slow truth
What grief seems to ask of us is not that we solve it but that we keep it company. That we let it sit at the table. That we let it walk with us into the next room. That we do not try, with our well-meaning frantic minds, to make it smaller or quieter or shorter than it is.
The people I know who have moved through their deepest losses with anything resembling grace did not bypass the grief. They walked through the middle of it, very slowly, with company. And on the other side they were not the person they had been — but they were a person, and the person they had become was somehow more present, more porous, more themselves.
