Grief & Loss
The most human of experiences, and the one we most avoid
Grief and loss are universal. Every human alive now, in the past, and in the future will contend with them. There is no escape. And yet our culture works remarkably hard to pretend otherwise — maximizing comfort, minimizing discomfort, keeping grief at bay for as long as possible.
Many people have told me that grief is the worst emotion of them all. I tend to agree. It is the most unpleasant to feel, which is precisely why so many people will do almost anything to avoid it. Everyone looks for the path through grief that doesn’t require actually feeling it. For better or worse, no such path exists. The only way through grief is through it — to allow it, to move with it, to make something like peace with it.
“Fearing the pain involved, almost all of us attempt to avoid problems — we procrastinate, ignore them, forget them, pretend they do not exist. We attempt to skirt around problems rather than meet them head on… This tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness.”
— M. Scott Peck, MD, The Road Less Traveled
Peck is naming the walls we build to protect ourselves from suffering — the elaborate structures we construct to keep grief at a manageable distance. The problem, as he understood well, is that avoidance compounds. What we refuse to feel doesn’t disappear. It accumulates.
Grief is not only about death
When most people think of grief, they think of death. And yes — the loss of a beloved person can yield some of the most intense grief a human being experiences. But grief is the wake after any loss, and loss is constant.
The break in your morning that you were counting on, suddenly taken by an urgent call. The date night that gets canceled because a child gets sick. The promotion that didn’t come through. These smaller losses accumulate quietly, and if we aren’t allowing ourselves to feel them along the way, they pile up. Our days are filled with countless small losses that can have a death-by-a-thousand-cuts effect when they go unacknowledged.
The cost of avoidance
Our culture actively supports the avoidance of pain. Much of our economy is driven by the pursuit of comfort at all costs — so much marketing is selling a feeling state. Comfort. Escape. The sense that something difficult can be made easier or put off entirely. And sometimes it can — for a while. But the difficulty and the sorrow wait. They are patient.
All the elaborate attempts to avoid grief only lead to more pain down the road. There are no shortcuts. What gets deferred accumulates interest.
Making the decision to lean into grief rather than away from it is countercultural. It is not an easy choice or an easy path. Nothing about it is easy. But it does not have to be walked alone.
The wall and what it costs
The same wall we build to keep grief out also keeps everything else at a distance — connection, joy, aliveness, depth. When we live behind the wall, we are protected from the worst of the pain, but we are also cut off from the fullness of life. The wall is not selective. It keeps out everything.
Learning to grieve — really grieve, not perform it or manage it — is the path to emotional resilience. Not because grief makes us tougher in the conventional sense, but because moving through loss teaches us that we can. We discover we are more durable than we thought. We come through changed, marked, and more capable of being present to whatever comes next.
What helps
Surrounding yourself with the right resources makes a real difference. Supportive, emotionally attuned community. Spiritual faith practices. Creative expression. Physical movement to support energetic release. Breathwork. Nourishing, life-giving activities. Oodles of self-compassion. Cats!
Together we can learn to walk the path of accepting and leaning into grief — not because it is comfortable, but because it is the only path that leads somewhere worth going.
Voices worth sitting with
“We are a death-phobic culture, and grief is its casualty.”
— Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise
“Through grief, we are invited into a more inclusive conversation between our singular lives and the soul of the world.”
— Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow
“Grief is essential to finding and maintaining a feeling of emotional intimacy with life, with one another, and with our own soul.”
— Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow
Grief and loss are woven into the very fabric of being human. In many ways, this is the foundational work — the ground beneath all the other work. Every page on this site, in one way or another, comes back to here.
The question is not whether we will grieve. The question is whether we will have the courage, the community, and the resources to step into it boldly — trusting that we will come through the other side more whole, more alive, more connected, more true. There is always a cost to grief. It leaves a mark. But the story doesn’t end there. Grief teaches us more about life than almost anything else. There is a cost, and there is a gift that emerges.
“Bringing grief and death out of the shadow is our spiritual responsibility, our sacred duty. By doing so, we may be able to feel our desire for life once again and remember who we are, where we belong, and what is sacred.”
— Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow
You don’t have to carry this alone
If grief has brought you here — fresh or long-carried, named or not yet named — reach out. We can find our way into it together.