In order to begin healing the pain of our losses, first we have to let ourselves sit with that pain. Noticing what’s underneath our resistance to sadness is the first step in allowing ourselves to feel it.

One of the many challenges of dying, grief, and loss is that it takes us into a place beyond language. Words become inadequate to describe our experience. Music, I find, often becomes a portal to that place that words cannot reach.

We’re often told that time heals all wounds, but when it comes to grief, that isn’t enough.

Understanding what is happening in your brain can help you understand some of your grief responses.

We tend to talk a lot about the big shifts in our lives that grief creates: the holidays without our loved ones, the missed milestones and celebrations, the future partners and kids that our people will never meet. But grief lives in the small spaces too, and sometimes those are the ones that can take us most by surprise.

New years don’t always mean new beginnings. Sometimes they are painful reminders of endings. Sometimes while the world is looking forward, we’re living in a separate space where time stands still, becomes muddled, or disappears altogether.

During the earliest weeks and months after my sister’s death, I often wrote what I needed to hear. If you’re feeling the deep pain of loss, perhaps these words that I wrote might hold something that you need to hear too.

Gathering with loved ones can heighten the ways we all experience the same loss in different ways. The framework of intuitive and instrumental grieving can help us understand other ways of grieving.

Here we are, doing impossible things.

There’s so much about grief that no one tells us, including how much it impacts every piece of our being. It takes over our bodies, minds, hearts, and spirit in ways that we likely aren’t prepared for and that we may not recognize.