This too is grief

When I first came to grief work, it was through the portal of a deep personal bereavement. It was the type of loss that people could see and touch. The suicide of my Mum so visceral and permanent that it felt natural, necessary even, for others to name my experience as ‘grief’.

And yet, I would have said that I had been grieving for years. Perhaps the difference now being that my external world was matching my inner one.

For years I had been grieving the loss of normality throughout my Mum’s depression. I had been grieving the comfort of home. I had been grieving the longing for a feeling of safety in my body. I had been grieving feeling like a totally unhinged 22-year-old compared to all my friends.

But, as the years have gone on and I’ve learned more about grief tending with Francis Weller’s five gates of grief, I have since realised that I had been grieving long before that too.

At school, I’d been grieving a sense of true belonging and sisterhood. Back spending many lunch times in the bathroom crying, often not knowing why but wondering – ‘surely it was all meant to be more kind than this?’ I look back now able to name my grief for an adolescence without connection, elders, wisdom and initiations. I was longing to feel my own entanglement with the web of life.

Later, I began my first corporate job working as an Organisational Psychologist at Deloitte (if you can imagine?!). Here, I was grieving the whole system entirely. I was grieving the emptiness I felt having to relentlessly push through late nights and early mornings against the screams of my cyclical body. I was grieving the longing for my own gifts to be witnessed and shared, rather than ignored or perhaps worse never even considered to begin with. I was grieving the small talk, the banter, the sexism, oh and let’s not forget the timesheets. I was grieving the quarterly meetings that only seemed to focus on growth, always more growth!

As the years rolled on and I’ve paid closer attention to our world, I recognise my grief everywhere. My grief lives in the single tree standing alone, dying without its ecosystem close by. My grief lives in the children’s cries and in the heartbroken mothers, especially those in war torn countries. My grief lives in our polluted waters and in the diminishing number of nightingales returning each year.

I say all of this not to overwhelm you because honestly, I am so grateful to be able to name and feel each one of these experiences as grief. When I talk about my work – The Grief Space – all too often I notice people either putting themselves firmly inside or outside of this word ‘grief’. And while tending to our deep personal bereavements will always be a huge part of this work, the truth is that I’m here for the widest, most universal, all reaching, all-encompassing definition of grief. The type of grief space that we’re all in, always, because that is what it means to be truly alive and paying attention.

You are welcome here if your grief is new or if it is ancient, or whether it was even yours to begin with. You are welcome here if your grief is tangible, or totally unseen. If your grief is personal or collective. You are welcome here if you’re grieving and you don’t know why. You are welcome here if your grief is emotional or physical, or both because it often is. You are welcome here if your grief is complicated, messy, angry. You are welcome here if your grief is layered, infused into our systems of oppression. You are welcome here if your grief is selfish. You are welcome here if your grief is love unbound. You are welcome here if your grief makes no sense, to me or even to you. You are welcome here if you don’t yet know what grief means.

You are welcome here.