The grief chronicles

Intro

We rarely talk openly about grief in professional spaces. But it reshapes our worldview, the ways in which we interact with each other and even what our value systems might look like. Our individual journeys though plain and loss can deeply influence who we approach our work, our sense of purpose and the missions that drive us. This directly impacts the relationships we nurture and those that fall to the wayside.?

With this post, I am sharing some intimate pieces of my own story, one that is shaped by vulnerability, grief and self-reflection. The grief chronicles reflect some of the lessons I have learned about carrying this weight through life. Grief is one of those experiences that is complex and cyclical. Navigating this has had a profound impact on my own sense of adaptability. This article is not about bouncing back or reinforcing the tropes around resilience. It is about embracing the changes from these experiences and understanding our worth is more than the measure of others' perceptions.?

I hope these words will resonate with others who have experienced grief and serve as a reminder to us all of the strength found in honour our journeys, they do not need to look the same and we do not need to "fix" ourselves to fit the expectations of the world around us.

The body and the cost of inner turmoil

My body is riddled with pain, yet she does amazing things, she carries me, my heart, and my soul through it all. When I feel like I cannot go on, it amazes me that after rest, it returns to me in cycles, with ebbs and flows like the changing seasons. Some seasons bring more darkness, while others welcome the return of light with warmth in a sweet embrace. I carry my trauma with me like guardians warding off the harms of tomorrow through a shield seeking to protect me from negative energy and remembrance. It took me many years to realize that the anger I held inside my bones was in fact grief.?

I am enough. Yes, enough. That does not mean I need to be humbled. Instead, it means I accept the wholeness of who I am—in mere moments, in parts, and as an entire being. I fight for myself, for the little girl I once was who was always measured and found wanting. Through my journey of self-discovery, I have come to understand that I belong wherever I am, which has helped me unpack who I truly am. Amid life’s disruptions and the challenges within my body, I find myself experiencing both loneliness and grief, but I do not wish it away. Grief does not know the bounds of time, nor can we fully understand the changes that come from going through it, changes that reshape a person’s soul and life as we are forced to let go.

If grief means we mourn our loss, it also means we find ways to keep that love alive. In learning how to carry this pain within ourselves, we also learn to carry that love and share it along the way with those who feel most right. I can feel joy and grief, gratitude and longing, abundance and loss, growth and exhaustion—all at once. It’s from the love we have to give but cannot give directly. All the unspent time and love gather and cling to the edges of our hearts. It creates a lump in our throat, the ache from within. This is love with no place to go. So we choose courage, or solace, or isolation. We do this often with the heaviest of hearts.

I fought myself to put into words what it means to be in pain. The above was the pain of my heart as I reflected on a body that suffered through three miscarriages. Yet, to write about the aches that radiate across my bones, the exhaustion both physical and mental, has always felt inadequate, so I shoved them deep down, hiding them away in a box. I realized I am not broken, I do not need to continue to break or hide the parts that make me whole. I need to use those experiences and my day-to-day life to be true to myself, to honour the path I’ve had to walk, and to recognize how it has shifted the direction of my life time and time again.

The mundane is extraordinary. In it, when my body is at rest, at play, or at work in nature, I feel more alive than at any other time in the day. At 38, my mission in life truly started to change. The space I was carving out for myself altered my brain chemistry.

Grief can taste like metal and blood in your mouth or feel like a rock in the pit of one’s stomach. It’s empty spaces, unwanted goodbyes, and harms done. A house may be a home, but so too can the heart, yet some of us are still waiting to wake up from dreams that descend into nightmares, with stolen memories, broken hearts, and tears that stream like rain. Love and loss, anxiety and fear—we mourn the living and the dead, with hearts so heavy. Grief and anger can coexist; scarcity and abundance leave us unprepared. Amid beautiful moments, where photographs of missing faces hang—some on walls, others locked away behind closed memories—we realize this is just the beginning.

Grief can feel like a trickle down a stream, a tidal wave, or the aftermath of a dam bursting when the damage is too great.

If we deserve to feel the same love we give, who deserves to feel the same pain? Does anyone? Ever?

My grief today feels astronomical. At moments, I feel as though I might suffocate—my breathing constricted, my heart racing, my body feeling as if it’s in slow motion and all at once. It’s like a wall of darkness, a night sky enveloping all my other senses until all that I can feel is this deep sense of pain, rejection, and a profound feeling of being truly unloved.

With this comes the realization that often, the trigger is manipulation, lies and deception for the sake of someone else’s ease as they navigate the harmful road they've created. Yet I am left to traverse that path, trying not to stumble and fall out of balance at any given moment. The wind picks up, the sky turns gray, and heavy pelting rain falls on me, sharp like hail, not warm like the summer rain I long for.

Tears stream down my face, and today the abundance of grief, it's the loss of something so heavy that putting one foot in front of the other feels almost impossible. The effort for repair and the anger I feel so deeply coexist, leaving me unprepared for the pain and anguish these moments unleash. Here I am, shivering in the aftermath of a dam bursting, tidal waves flooding all around me, debris floating everywhere, threatening to cause more damage.

I try to remember to breathe; inhale, exhale—close my eyes and slow my heart rate. I’m forever searching for a way to ground and center my struggling nervous system. But the shock strikes with high voltage as I realize: that the past is not in the past. The past is still my present.

I did not sit and linger in sadness and sorrow. I built myself a life, even when the losses piled high and my needs spent decades being unmet, unacknowledged and unprocessed. This anger festered, without an identifiable source but rested deeply within me shaming my spirit and stripping my soul of the love it had to give to this work. My grief isn't just the loss of loved ones, but it is the loss of whom I was once going to be, my dreams, the stability, and a belief in myself, along with all those who were supposed to love me. I had no outlet, no passage in which I could be acknowledged, and it was rooted in resentment and bitterness and made me hard. It took me what felt like ages to find my softness again. The active force of recognizing grief for what it was and seeking out a way to express myself allowed me to carve a new path forward.?

I’ve been put through the wringer over and over again. The alarm bells go off inside my head and my words become sharp and tense in zero to sixty. My heart is often held together with twine, zip ties, tape and glue if you will. The solace of the garden has started to mend the cracks yet resilience isn’t something my heart has found. Instead, I’m focusing on the manifesting heaviness that lodges itself in the body and spirit. With this, I attempt to honour the rhythms of life, and the need to be present within the now without needing to “fix” myself. This journey helped me find that I am enough and wholly deserving of my place in this world. I’m not bothered by the measurement of others to find validation or to measure my worth. I’m a living, breathing human being and while this grief journey has shaped my identity it’s not been a linear experience. With this knowledge, I’ve been infusing intent into the spaces and places where I exist, at rest or at play.

As a person who lives with chronic pain, I recognize the impact this life has had on my body and the score that trauma has left in the form of mental exhaustion, depression, increased ADHD symptoms, anxiety, and a host of other things. Much of this I would mask, attempt to hide but I have come to recognize that these experiences have become the foundation of my fortitude, and inner strength and provided me the space to redefine who I am and what I value. Grief is visceral; with it I’m acknowledging my pain without letting it define me. I choose to hold onto love in the face of loss, and I will continue building a life with intent and authenticity. Tomorrow may be beautiful. I truly believe that. These words that I pen are a form of therapy. Disconnecting from the people and places that have caused you grief is not hatred, it is for me a way to recognize that I no longer align with them and that space in time. It has helped me determine what energy deserves a space in my life. There is no clean cut, it’s a messy end, yet I’m okay with this unfinished ending because closure is rarely neat and tidy. I’m not afraid of the monsters in my head, the whispers in my ear, or the shattering of my all too fragile heart. I remapped my life and created new constellations to follow and that grief will likely always be with me. It’s okay. It’s all going to be okay.