Grief & Life Transitions
Grief happens to all of us. It is not a problem to solve or a phase to move through on schedule. It is one of the most human experiences there is.
And yet our culture doesn’t make much room for it. We are uncomfortable with grief — our own and other people’s — so we learn to push it down, stay busy, move on. We get the message early that there is a timeline, and that falling apart is an inconvenience.
But grief doesn’t disappear when we suppress it. It waits. It settles into the body and stays there — until the next loss arrives and opens the door again, and suddenly we are grieving more than just the present moment. Old losses surface alongside new ones, asking to finally be felt.
“Grief lives in the body until it is witnessed.”
Until someone can sit with you in it without flinching, without rushing you toward the other side.
I know grief. I have experienced profound loss, and I am still here — living a life of love, connected to myself. That isn’t in spite of the grief. It’s because I didn’t run from it.
That’s what I bring into this work. A capacity to sit with pain without needing to fix it or move it along. To be present with you in the hardest moments, for as long as it takes.
Grief after loss
The death of someone we love carries a particular intensity. It can shake your sense of safety, your sense of self, and your sense of what life is even for. Nothing feels the same. Because it isn’t.
You may move through waves of sadness, shock, exhaustion, and disorientation. You may feel unmoored from ordinary life, or strangely distant from the grief itself. All of it is part of the process.
The butterfly is an ancient symbol of grief — and I think it gets at something true. What happens inside a cocoon isn’t pretty or comfortable. It is a complete dissolution. But it is also a transformation. The butterfly that emerges is not the caterpillar restored. It is something new.
Grief works like that when we let it. When we stop fighting the waves and allow them to move through us — like contractions — they do their work. They transform us from the inside. Our lives can take turns we never anticipated, not because loss broke us, but because something in us was cracked open and began to grow toward the light.
Grief and transition
Not all grief follows a death. Some of the most disorienting losses come wrapped in milestones — the moments our culture tells us to celebrate.
Leaving childhood behind. Becoming a parent. Watching your children leave home. Marriage. Divorce. Retirement. Each one asks you to release a version of yourself and a chapter of life that is over. And if we don’t stop to honor what we are leaving behind, it follows us — a quiet drag on the new chapter, a sense of incompleteness we can’t quite name.
Every transition has two sides. The arrival and the departure. We tend to celebrate the arrival and rush past the departure. But the letting go deserves its own moment. Its own acknowledgment. Maybe even its own ritual.
When we grieve a transition consciously — when we look clearly at what was, honor it, and release it — we step into what’s next without the weight of the unfinished. The new phase gets to be fully new.
That is its own kind of freedom. And it is worth pausing for.