Grief is Not the End of the Road—It’s the Doorway to What Comes Next
I was maybe five years old the first time I met grief. I wouldn’t have called it in the moment thought I didn’t have the words for it. I only had the feeling—a deep loneliness, hollow and cold, settling into my frail body. My brother was bullying me. I reached for my mom, tugging at the hem of her attention, and the only thing I could manage to say was, “He’s being mean to me.” She barely looked up. “You two need to work this out.”That was the moment. The first time grief curled itself around my bones.The first time I felt truly alone. The first time I knew that no one was coming to protect me. I wouldn’t have known to call it grief. It wasn’t death, a funeral or a loss that the world would acknowledge. But something had died in me all the same. My original innocence was lost, it went into exile, and something else took its place—a sharp tracker, an observer, someone who could see the lay of the land who learned to anticipate what might be coming before it arrived. It was an uncontained initiation but an initiation nonetheless. An initiation without a guide. And initiations without guides don’t transform you cleanly—they fracture you.
The Apprenticeship of Grief
At this early age I didn’t know how to relate to that grief, how to tend to it, or how to love it. I didn’t know how to honor its existence or listen to what it was asking me to pay attention to. In fact, it took me the better part of my life to hear its relentless nag for my attention. Instead, I did what so many of us do—I tried to move past it. I sought acceptance and validation. I abandoned myself in a hundred different ways. I kept seeking something outside of me that might fill the place that had been hollowed out.But grief doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t go away just because we refuse to look at it. It stays, shaping us in ways we don’t understand. And if we don’t enter into relationship with it, it calcifies. It becomes a wound we tourniquet, cutting off our own vitality, and then wonder why we feel numb.It took me years to understand that grief isn’t something to move past or get through. It isn’t something to be solved. Grief is a relationship. It asks to be honored, to be loved, to be included in the story of who we are. It asks to alchemize us.The Cost of Avoiding Grief
To not be in relationship with our grief is to not know the deepest parts of ourselves. It was in this experience that I truly never met myself as I am or ever was. I came to hide so many tendr parts of myself and aimed to not fail or succeed too greatly. In grief, something is always lost, but something is also received. When we ignore grief, we don’t just ignore the pain—we ignore the gift it leaves behind. We cut ourselves off from the fullness of our own authenticity.And yet, so many of us try. We distract. We rationalize. We push forward, thinking that time alone will soften the edges. But grief doesn’t work on a timeline. It waits. And the longer we ignore it, the more it shapes us in ways we don’t see.In my own life, grief has been the undercurrent of so many things. The ancient loneliness born in that early moment of bullying has stayed with me, apprenticing me in ways I’m only now beginning to understand. My relationship with my parents, their illnesses, and their dying process has deepened that apprenticeship. I have come to know grief intimately, and it has taught me more than I ever expected.There is No ‘Through’
Grief is not a road with an exit. You don’t complete grief. You don’t move on and leave it behind. The relationship changes, but it never ends. You will not lose the person you grieve, or in my case the version of myself that I lost at such a young age by allowing the process to unfold. Instead, you will deepen into them. You will find new ways to hold them, to carry them, to let them shape you into something more whole.This is a sacred and solitary journey—one that we cannot do alone. Because grief, in its deepest form, is about connection. To grieve is to have loved, to have cared, to have been changed by something or someone. And in its unfolding, grief can become one of our richest experiences of connection—to ourselves, to others, to life itself.Tending the Relationship
So what does it look like to be in relationship with grief? How do we give it the containment, the witness, the warmth it asks for?For me, it has meant finding ways to stay in dialogue with my grief, rather than shutting it away. I have built altars in my home—small, sacred spaces that hold reminders of those I’ve lost and the parts of myself that needed honoring. I have created grief rituals, setting aside time to sit with sorrow rather than push past it. Journaling has been a powerful tool, allowing me to give voice to what otherwise might stay buried. I have moved my body through it, let tears become prayers, let silence become communion. I have learned to hold my own grief with both reverence and curiosity.And for those who are navigating their own grief, the invitation is to find what works for you. Maybe it is writing letters to the ones you’ve lost. Maybe it’s creating a practice of lighting a candle each morning. Maybe it’s movement—walking, dancing, breathing through the ache. Maybe it’s sitting in stillness, simply allowing yourself to feel.Whatever it is, the most important thing is that it is yours. That it is honest. That it allows you to remain in relationship with the parts of yourself that grief has touched.Because grief is not something to be solved. It is something to be carried with honor, to be witnessed, to be integrated into the wholeness of who we are. And when we tend to it, when we let it matter, we find that grief does not take from us—it deepens us.We soften. We breathe. We move. We return. Again and again, we return—to ourselves, to our grief, to the life that still wants to be lived.Because grief is not the end of the road. It is the doorway to what comes next. And if we let it, it will show us the way.