The losses within loss

I’ve been thinking a lot about grief the past month. Mostly feeling into everything that happens around that absence, and the things we rarely speak of, like the loneliness.

And not just loneliness of missing someone, but the loneliness of discovering how few people really know how to be with you in your grief. And how loss can begin to change the landscape of your friendships.

You begin to notice who can sit beside you in something they cannot understand or change. Who can listen without searching for the right words, without comparing your experience to theirs, without needing to find a reason or a lesson in what happened. And who, often without realizing it, meets your grief through the lens of their own fears, their own unresolved pain, their own discomfort with things they cannot control.

When grief becomes uncomfortable for others

It feels strange to me, that in the midst of losing someone, you find yourself taking care of everyone else's feelings about your loss.

Noticing the hesitation in someone's voice, the change in their expression, or how they approach you. The way that a conversation becomes uncomfortable when you speak about how you're really doing. So you say a little less, you hold back a little more, you reassure people that you're good, even when your heart feels heavy. Because it becomes more exhausting to share then not to.

And then before you know it, you're making yourself smaller in a moment when you might need more space than ever. There's this particular loneliness in having to make your grief easier for other people to be around. And I know it's not always a lack of love or care, and I also know not many of us have actually learned to be with pain that we cannot take away.

It seems that we have become quite skilled at finding ways around grief. We talk about moving on, finding closure, being strong, focusing on the good memories or the future.

But what about just being with someone in the middle of it? Without a solution, without an expiration date and without secretly waiting for them to become the person they were before.

I think we might struggle to meet others in their grief because it brings us so close to everything we haven't learned to face within ourselves.

Our helplessness, our fear of losing what we love, the parts of our own sorrow we've never really allowed ourselves to feel.

I feel that, to sit with someone else's grief is, in some way, to sit with the truth of our own impermanence. And that can be a difficult place to remain.

A love beyond language

I've also been reflecting on the strange hierarchy we've created around loss. As though grief, for some people, becomes more or less legitimate depending on who we've lost. A person or an animal.

As if love could be measured by species, or the depth of a relationship by whether words were ever exchanged.

I’ve spoken and written about this a lot, but one of the deepest relationships of our lives can exist beyond language.

An animal can know you through entire chapters of your existence. They can be there through childhood and heartbreak. They can be a source of safety and consistency through decades of change, through all the different versions of yourself. They know the sound of your footsteps, the way you move, your presence before you've said a word, and you know theirs.

There's an entire world that exists between two beings who have shared their lives for years. A world that no one else has ever quite been part of. And when one of them dies, that world changes forever.

You grieve their presence, but also all the ordinary moments that become memories, and the way your day was shaped around another living being. And maybe you also grieve the version of yourself that existed alongside them. Because some beings hold parts of our history that no one else ever will.

It's a strange thing, to feel like you’re living in two realities at once. One in which life continues, and another in which someone is physically missing from everything.

I’m witnessing that grief can also reveal things we might otherwise have gone years without seeing. About our relationships, about our expectations, about the ways we've learned to abandon parts of ourselves to remain connected to others.

Noticing that the people you thought would be there aren't able to meet you where you are, and sometimes people you never expected become the ones who can. And there can be grief in realizing that certain relationships may only have had room for certain versions of you. The one who could show up, who could listen, who could give, who could make things lighter. But maybe not so much the one who is tired, heartbroken, less available, or just changed.

I think it's possible to understand that people have their own limitations, their own histories, their own capacities, and still feel hurt by what they cannot offer. Compassion for someone else's limitations does not mean we have to deny the impact they have on us.

It’s been one of the more uncomfortable truths grief brings to the surface. That understanding someone doesn't necessarily mean they can meet us at the depth that we want or need, and that love and the capacity to be present are not always the same thing.

The spiritual side of grief I find difficult to put into words. It does bring us into an intimate relationship with impermanence. With the uncomfortable truth that everything we love exists in a form that will one day change.

That no matter how deeply we love, we cannot hold life still, it is ever changing. And my suffering comes from asking something so inherently temporary to become permanent. We want another day, another year, another ordinary morning together. We want the familiar presence to remain exactly where it has always been. And of course we do, because we love.

But accepting impermanence can also mean slowly learning that we can love something with our whole being without ever being able to keep it in our physical world. That love was never ownership, and that the ending of a life doesn't necessarily mean the ending of a relationship, it just changes form. It lives in our memories, in our bodies, in the ways another being has shaped how we move through the world.

And in the most unexpected moments, something brings them close again. And for a moment, absence and presence seem to exist together. It feels both heartbreaking and extraordinary.

The art of being with another's sorrow

Grief has also made me reflect on what it really means to be there for someone, and it might have very little to do with knowing what to say.

It's being able to witness someone's sadness or pain, without making it about our own inability to change it. To let someone cry without rushing toward reassurance. To let them laugh without assuming they're finished grieving. To let them speak about the one they've lost, again and again, without feeling the need to change the subject. To understand that grief is not a straight line, and that someone can be deeply grateful for their life, while their heart feels heavy.

I would love to see what our relationships, our friendships, our communities would look like if we became more capable of being with the things we cannot fix. If we stopped treating sadness as something that needs to be resolved before life can continue.

If we allowed grief to belong to life, rather than seeing it as an interruption of it. One of the greatest gifts we can offer another person is to let them know they don't have to carry their pain alone, and that we’re not here to take it away. But that begins with our willingness to meet our own. Everything we haven’t felt or faced.

I wish we understood more that someone who is grieving does not always need perspective, advice, or words of encouragement. They might just need to know and feel that their grief doesn't make them harder to love. That they don't have to return to who they were to remain worthy of connection.

And that they can be exactly where they are, without having to make it more comfortable for anyone else.