Grief and Joy

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Grief Is Unexpressed Joy 

(when joy has no place to go)

I say this often enough that it's become something of a signature line: grief is unexpressed joy. But I don't think I've ever slowed down enough to actually unpack what that means - or what it asks of us once we believe it.

The short version: we don't grieve what we didn't love. The size of the ache is the size of the love that no longer has anywhere to go. That's what is meant by “unexpressed” - not that the joy is gone, but that it has lost its outlet. The person who used to receive it, the future that used to hold it, the version of you that used to give it - at least one of those doors has closed, and the joy is still standing there with nowhere to walk through.

That reframe may change how we move in and with the work of grief.  The goal shift from getting rid of the feeling. To finding the joy a new door.  WITHOUT LETTING GO OF THE PAST CONNECTION. That connection is still a part of who we are.  It has changed us (the way we think and see the world) science can now even show the chemical and neurological pathways that have shifted in our physical selves because of connections and the loss of connections.

Naming what we're actually seeking

Most of us, in the thick of loss, think we're seeking relief. Fewer tears. A calmer chest. Sleep that doesn't get interrupted by 3am replays. And relief is real, and it matters, and I'd never tell someone not to want it.

But underneath the relief, I think what we're actually seeking is somewhere to put the love.

That's a different question than "how do I feel better," and it's worth asking directly: Where does this love go now?  One of the places the love used to live has given way, and the joy is still standing there, roots and all, looking for new soil.  The reframe changes what grief work is actually for.  It isn't about getting rid of the feeling.  It's about finding the joy new ground to grow in.  Sometimes it goes into a ritual - a candle, an anniversary walk, a name spoken out loud at dinner. Sometimes it goes into other people, redirected toward someone who's still here and could use it. Sometimes it goes into a version of yourself you build specifically to carry it - a quieter one, a braver one, one who does the thing the person you lost never got to do. 

None of that is "moving on." It's finding the love somewhere new to take root.

What it means to be uprooted by grief

That search for new ground is its own kind of uprooting - and it usually feels like being shoved. One day you're standing, and the next you're not, and it's tempting to look for the hand that pushed you. But most of the time, when I sit with people in this, there wasn't one hand. There was a season of small somethings - a diagnosis two years back, a slow drift in a relationship, a body that quietly stopped being able to do what it used to - and grief was simply the moment all those somethings finished their work. The shove is real. It's just rarely a single push. More often it's an uprooting that had been happening underground for a long time before the tree actually fell.

That matters, because it changes the question. It's not "who did this to me," or even "what happened." It's: what had already loosened, before this finally let go?

And as we re-tell this story one thing we never say out loud enough: once a tree is uprooted, you don't stand it back up and call it the same tree. After a real loss, you don't go back to who you were. You can't. The person who loved without needing to grieve doesn't exist anymore - that self depended on the ground staying a certain shape, and the ground didn't hold. 

So the work isn't replanting the old tree. It's growing new roots, in whatever soil you actually have now.

That's a harder sentence to sit with than "healing," because it doesn't promise a finish line. It just asks a question: who are you now, on the other side of the fall?

A few things I've noticed, walking with people through grief - and living it myself:

• You may carry your love differently. Less possessively, sometimes. More attentively to what's still here, because you know now how quietly "still here" can start to loosen.
• You may find your capacity for others' pain grows. Not because you sought that out, but because putting down new roots teaches you something about companionship you couldn't have learned any other way.
• You may need new language for who you are. "Daughter" becomes "daughter who lost her mother." "Partner" becomes something else entirely. Those aren't smaller identities. They're just true ones, and true takes some getting used to.
• You may not like the new self right away. That's allowed. New roots take time to hold, and it doesn't have to feel good yet to be honest.

You don't have to do this alone

If there's one thing under everything I do - the coaching, the Healing Touch, the ministry, all of it - it's this: you are not meant to hold this by yourself. Not the grief, and not the redefining that comes after it.

If you're in a season of being uprooted right now, I'd gently ask you two things this week. 

First: where is the love that lost its door trying to go? 

And second: who's one person you could let see the self you're still becoming, instead of performing the one you used to be?

You don't have to have it figured out. But you can let someone walk with you while you do.

Honored to walk with you, Erin

Still Adulting….(with lists)

Class Doesn't End When You Graduate

Apparently, my brain wasn't finished with adulting.

I wrote recently about the unglamorous version of adulting, you know the part nobody really teaches you. Taking care of yourself. Letting other people take care of you. Building community. Remembering that your own needs don't belong at the very bottom of the list.

And of course, because apparently my brain likes to keep working on things after I've already written about them, another thought showed up.

Maybe part of the problem is that we spend so much of our childhood being taught how to become adults that we forget something important once we actually get there:

The learning isn't supposed to stop.

As kids, we learn constantly. We learn how to talk and read and write. We learn the rules of the classroom, the playground, and our families. We learn how to make friends, how to share, how to behave, how to be good.

And somewhere in all of that, we're also learning about ourselves. What gets us praised. What gets us in trouble. What makes people happy with us. What feels safe. What doesn't.

We're learning how to be a person in the world.

And then eventually, we graduate.

School ends. The formal lessons stop. And somehow we're expected to know what we're doing.

We're supposed to know how to have relationships, communicate, handle disappointment, care for ourselves, make decisions, know what we believe, know who we are, and somehow have a reasonable idea of what comes next.

Which, when you really think about it, is kind of a lot to expect from someone simply because they've reached adulthood.

Because those aren't things you graduate from.

They're things you keep learning.

Maybe childhood gives us a foundation. Some of us get a really solid one. Some of us get one with a few cracks. And some of us spend a good portion of adulthood realizing that something we thought was a foundation was actually just something we learned to survive on top of.

However we got here, eventually we have to decide what we're going to build from there.

And that's where adulthood gets interesting.

Because the lessons change when you've lived a little.

We learn about kindness as children. Then life teaches us that kindness without boundaries can become self-abandonment. We learn about independence, and eventually discover that independence without connection can become loneliness. We learn to be responsible, and then discover that being responsible for everything isn't the same thing as being responsible for ourselves.

We learn to communicate, and eventually discover that communicating honestly is considerably harder than knowing how to talk.

We learn to take care of ourselves, and then our bodies change. Our circumstances change. Our relationships change. Our capacity changes. And suddenly something that worked beautifully before doesn't work anymore.

Same lesson.

Different depth.

I used to think growing up meant becoming more certain.

Now I'm not so sure.

Maybe growing up is becoming more curious.

Curious enough to notice when an old answer doesn't quite fit anymore. Curious enough to stop and ask, What do I actually need now?

Not what did I need at 25. Not what worked five years ago. Not what everyone else seems to be doing.

What do I need now?

Here.

In this body.

In this season.

With the life I actually have.

That's a different kind of learning than the kind we did in school. There isn't always a textbook. There isn't necessarily a teacher standing at the front of the room. There isn't a final exam where someone tells you whether you got it right.

Sometimes life is the teacher.

Sometimes it's a relationship. Sometimes it's our body. Sometimes it's a mistake we wish we hadn't made. Sometimes it's grief. Sometimes it's simply the quiet realization that the thing we've been calling “fine” hasn't actually been fine for quite a while.

And sometimes the lesson is noticing that we've changed.

This is something I think about a lot in my work with the four energy bodies—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.

We can understand something intellectually and still not know how to live it.

We can know that rest matters and still feel guilty when we rest. We can know that boundaries matter and still struggle to set one. We can understand that our emotions carry information and still try to outrun them.

The information isn't necessarily the missing piece.

Sometimes the missing piece is depth.

It's taking something we've known for years and allowing it to become something we actually live. Moving an idea from our head into our body, our choices, our relationships, our actual Tuesday afternoon.

That's a different kind of education.

That's the education of adulthood.

And maybe this is one of the most underappreciated gifts of getting older:

We get to learn the same things again.

Not because we failed the first time.

Because we're not the same person we were the first time.

“Take care of yourself” means something different after you've lived through a season that emptied you. “Let people help you” means something different after you've discovered how exhausting it is to always be the capable one. “Know yourself” means something different when you're finally willing to meet the parts of yourself you edited out for other people's comfort.

The lesson hasn't changed.

We have.

We don't outgrow the lessons.

We grow into them.

And maybe we're not supposed to figure all of this out alone.

Learning as an adult can be strangely lonely. There is no homeroom. No bell rings to tell us it's time to talk about relationships or grief or purpose or belonging.

And yet so much of what we're learning is relational.

We need other people to help us see ourselves. People who have walked a little farther down the road. People who can say, “I've been there.” People who can challenge an old story, remind us of something we've forgotten, or simply sit beside us while we figure out what the next lesson is.

Maybe community isn't just where we go to feel connected.

Maybe community is part of how we continue to learn.

So I'm trying to remember this.

I don't need to have arrived.

I don't need to have mastered myself or figured out the perfect way to live.

I can stay a student.

I can be curious. I can notice when something that used to work doesn't anymore. I can revisit an old lesson and discover something new inside it. I can ask better questions. I can let my life teach me.

Maybe that's a much kinder definition of growth than the one we're usually handed.

Growth isn't necessarily becoming someone completely different.

Sometimes it's becoming more deeply who you already are.

Sometimes it's taking what you learned as a child and finally understanding it with an adult's heart.

Sometimes it's realizing that the lesson you thought you had finished was actually just the first chapter.

The class doesn't end when you graduate.

Maybe there was never supposed to be a graduation.

Maybe we're meant to keep learning for as long as we're here.

Still learning.

Still becoming.

Still here.

Honored to walk with you,

Erin

ADULTING TOGETHER

 Buckle up and get comfy - this one it longer that the usual…

I woke up this morning with a thought that felt important. Clear, even - the kind that makes you sit up a little. And then, by the time I actually got out of bed, it was gone. I couldn't tell you a single word of it.

That happens to me more than I'd like to admit. But this one left something behind - not the words, just the shape of it. And when I sat with that shape for a while, I realized it wasn't about grief. It wasn't about transition, which is usually where my mind goes when I write here. It was something plainer than that, and honestly a little harder to pin down.

It was about adulting.

I usually think about adulting in the version where you buy good cheese and feel like you have your life together. But this one is more the real, unglamorous kind - the one nobody actually teaches you. As best I can tell, there were four things underneath it:

1. Take care of yourself  -  and not just the body. All of you: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual.
2. You're not meant to do this life alone. None of us are.
3. It's okay to take care of yourself before you've run yourself into the ground taking care of everyone else.
4. And what "taking care of yourself" actually means keeps changing as you get older. Nobody warns you about that part either.

You've been keeping receipts on all four fronts, not just one.
The care that used to work has an expiration date.  You were never supposed to do this solo.  Put your own oxygen mask on first (yes, again, still, forever)

I want to walk through each of these honestly, not as a tidy list of advice, but as things I'm still learning myself.

One quick note before I do: I talk a lot in my work about the four energy bodies we're all carrying - physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. They're not separate departments running on separate schedules. They're one system. Neglect one long enough, and the others start picking up the slack.

Somewhere along the way a lot of us got fed the same terrible advice: Push through it. Rest is for later. Acting as if your body is basically a car - you gas it up, you drive it into the ground, and if it breaks, well, that's what mechanics are for.

Turns out that's not quite right!!!  And it's not only about the body. It's all four parts of us.

  ✋ Physically, your body isn't quietly waiting in the background while you handle "real life" — it's taking notes the entire time. Every skipped meal, every "I'll sleep when I'm dead" night, every time you white-knuckled through something instead of resting — your nervous system was there for all of it, keeping a running tab. Rest isn't the boring intermission before the real show. Rest is the show. It's when the body does its actual repair work.
 💞  Emotionally, the feelings you keep shoving to "deal with later" don't politely wait their turn. They leak. Into your patience, your sleep, your tone of voice with the people who least deserve it.
   💁  Mentally, a brain that never gets to stop problem-solving doesn't get sharper - it gets foggier. That's not you losing your edge. That's you needing an actual off-switch, not a shorter to-do list.
    😇    Spiritually, you can run for a surprisingly long time on empty before you notice - until one day you look up and realize you've been going through motions with nothing underneath them.

I've walked with a lot of people through hard seasons - grief, illness, life just generally throwing chairs - and the ones who come out the other side intact are almost never the toughest, most stoic, gritted-teeth types. They're the ones who kept some kind of actual relationship with all four parts of themselves the whole way through. Not just rest that was really rest and movement that felt good instead of punishing. Also space to actually feel the feelings, room to let the mind idle, and something - however small - that kept them tethered to meaning.

It’s worth the time being honest about knowing that whatever self-care formula worked for you at 25 probably isn't the one that works now. The workout that used to leave you buzzing might now leave you wrecked for three days. (this one I keep re-learning) Running on four hours of sleep and sheer willpower has quietly stopped being a trick and started being a liability.

This is not you getting soft. This is not you losing your edge. This is just... biology, doing its thing, the way it does for literally… every… human... who has ever aged past twenty-five. And it's not only physical - what actually settles your mind, moves your emotions, or feeds you spiritually shifts too. The meditation that used to calm you might now feel like sitting in a waiting room. The thing that used to feel like enough spiritually might now feel thin. (the music, the movement, the prayers all need a different depth)

The people who seem to age with some grace aren't the ones who found the one perfect routine and stuck with it forever. They're the ones who stayed curious. Who keep asking, "okay, what do I actually need right now, at this age, in this season" - instead of stubbornly running the same old software on a body that's been quietly upgrading itself the whole time.

This is the one I feel deeply and then of course keep foregtting to give it words… we are not meant to carry our lives by ourselves. Not the logistics, not the weight of it, not the meaning of it.

We get so good at performing fine. "Fine" on autopilot. Everyone leans on us, we're the reliable one, the one who's got it together - and there's something genuinely good in that. But it can also quietly turn into its own weird kind of loneliness, where everyone around you assumes you're fine simply because you're so convincing at pretending.

Adulting well was never about needing nobody. It's about deliberately building a small crew of people who actually walk with you - not just people you show up for, but people who show up for you, who'd notice if you went quiet under the weight of everyone else's stuff.
That crew doesn't just appear. You have to let it in. (and notice that it is there - and tend it)

But it's not only about the small crew of our “claimed” people. It’s also community, capital C - the wider net underneath the net. The people who aren't your closest three but who still know your name, who'd show up with a casserole or a ride to the airport or just a text that says "thinking of you" without you having to ask. Somewhere along the way "self-sufficient" got treated like the goal, and community started to feel optional - a nice-to-have instead of something we actually need to function like humans.

It isn't optional. We were built for it. Actual belonging - a church, a neighborhood, a team, a group chat that's been going for a decade, whatever your version is - does something a therapist, a partner, or your best friend alone can't fully do. It reminds you that you're part of something bigger than your own life, and that you don't have to hold the whole thing together by yourself because you're not the only load-bearing wall in the room.

If you don't have that right now, that's not a character flaw either - communities take time to build and even more courage to actually join. But it's worth asking: where could you let yourself be known a little more? Where could you show up not as the helper, but just as a person?

Yourself first, not last

We tend to treat our own needs like the last item on the list - the thing that gets attention only once everyone else's is handled. And then everyone else's needs never quite stop, so ours never quite get their turn.

You cannot keep giving from a place that's already empty, no matter how noble your intentions are or how many people are counting on you. Taking care of yourself first isn't selfish - it's what actually makes you capable of showing up for everyone else. Not a depleted, running-on-fumes version of you performing care. The real version, with something left to give.

So maybe that's the whole revelation, reassembled from whatever scraps my brain left me: adulting isn't about doing more, carrying more, proving more. It's about tending to all of who you are - physical, emotional, mental, spiritual - not just the one part that happens to be visible in a mirror. It's letting people walk with you, your close crew and your wider community both, instead of just carrying things for you. It's giving yourself permission to come first sometimes - not because you matter more than everyone else, but because you matter too. And it's staying honest that all of this keeps shifting, so you have to keep paying attention instead of coasting on autopilot.

You are not meant to do this life alone.

None of us are.

Honored to walk with you, Erin

Transition time

The Rhythm I Broke, the Mold That Won Round 1, and the Ghost of Ironmans Past

I missed writing here last week. Not because nothing happened - plenty happened - but because I no longer have posts written ahead. I used to keep a little stash of them, like emergency granola bars for the soul. Somewhere in the last several months, I quietly ate all the granola bars and didn't restock. I only noticed when I looked at my own blog and thought, "huh, who's been slacking" - and then remembered it's me.

So let's talk about it: the writing, the mess, the school bells, and the fact that I ran five miles this morning and immediately compared myself to a person who doesn't exist anymore.

What a Rhythm Is For

A rhythm isn't a schedule. A schedule tells you where to be. A rhythm tells you who you're being while you get there. When I had posts banked ahead of time, I wasn't just being a productive little content machine - I was giving future-me a gift. Past-me, back when she had it together (which is a rare thing indeed), was basically leaving present-me a note that said "you've got this, I already did the hard part." Then the notes ran out, and present-me has been improvising ever since.

The Mess as a Nervous System Problem

Right now part of my home looks like a renovation project that got paused mid-thought. Water leak, black mold, and all my Healing Touch and coaching materials shoved into a pile on one side of the room. It's going to get worse before it gets better, which is a sentence I really didn't need to hear about my own living room.

The thing is (for those of you who have ever done a home-remodel you know): a household mess isn't just a mess. It's a small, tireless presence in the back of my mind, tapping my shoulder every time I walk past that room to whisper unfinished. Multiply that by every doorway I pass in a day, and you get a very specific kind of tired - the kind where nothing has technically happened yet and you're already worn down, mostly by furniture.

And Then School Started

Just to keep things interesting, school picked this exact moment to start back up. Mornings got earlier, evenings got shorter, and the loose, summer version of my week got quietly replaced with one that actually has consequences if I ignore it. Any rhythm that was already running thin gets found out fast in and it is not even September (we started school EXTRA early this year).

The Ghost of Ironman Past

AND THEN, I ran five miles this morning (which is really a good thing BUT). It has been ages. AND before I even laced up, an old voice showed up that I didn't invite: an Ironman-training mentality, still living somewhere in my head, looking ahead at five perfectly solid half-marathon-training miles and quietly asking, "...that's it?" I carried that stress out the door with me - weight that had nothing to do with the run itself and everything to do with a version of me who used to train for something much bigger.

Half marathon training and Ironman training were never the same sport, or the same mileage, or the same season of my life - (but I did half marathons as training runs for Ironman training and so there is that layer) and some part of me is still running the old program like it never got the update. That's not motivation. That's just extra stress I'm generating for free, for races that ended years ago.

I'd like to retire that voice. Five miles was a good run, and I'd like to be allowed to enjoy it as exactly what it was.

Where Coaching and Healing Touch Come Into It

In my coaching and Healing Touch work, I talk about four energy bodies - physical, emotional, mental, spiritual - that all emanate from a person and all affect each other. None of them operate in isolation, which is a nice way of saying: of course the mold pile is showing up in my sleep, and of course an old training voice is showing up in my running, and of course a missed blog post is showing up as guilt at 6:30pm. It's all one system.

The mess is physical, but it's also emotional weight I'm carrying room to room. The Ironman voice is mental, but it lands in my body as tension I didn't need to add to a good run. None of this is a character flaw - it's just how energy moves through a person. The work isn't to muscle through on willpower; it's to notice where the load actually is and tend to it there, rather than white-knuckling through one body while three others quietly carry the bill.

Getting Back On It

So here's what I'm choosing, out loud, so it's harder to quietly let slide again:

• Writing ahead again. Not a huge backlog - even one week's cushion is the difference between a hard week and a hard week where I also go quiet and worry everyone.
• Let the mess be a signal, not a verdict. That pile isn't proof I'm failing at life. It's proof I'm mid-repair. and that I have a plan to cull some of the excess.
• Build the rhythm for the season I'm actually in. July's pace doesn't fit September, and an old Ironman pace doesn't fit this year's half marathon. Carrying an old rhythm into a new season isn't discipline - it's just extra weight I don't need to carry.

If you're behind on something, living next to a mess you can't fix yet, adjusting to a new school-year clock, or quietly measuring yourself against a version of you from a few years back - you're not failing. You're just between seasons. The plan isn't to fix it all today. It's one written-ahead post, one cleared corner, one mile that gets to just be a good mile, at a time.

And if you need someone to walk with you through whatever season you're in - I'm here.

The Grief and the Joy Hiding Inside "Back to School"

The Grief and the Joy Hiding Inside "Back to School” (especially when it is early)

There's a particular ache that shows up this time of year (well generally in the midwest this  “ache” is a few weeks away - but here in SoCal we are moving into back to school), and it rarely gets named for what it is. There's also, right alongside the ache, there is a particular delight - new backpacks, fresh notebooks, a kid genuinely excited to see their friends - that doesn't always get named either.

We call it "getting back into routine." We call it "adjusting." We post the first-day-of-school photos and talk about how fast the summer went. (for us it was particularly fast as we are shifting the days of the school year). What we don't often say out loud is that transitions - even good ones, even "excited-for" ones - carry both loss and joy inside them at once. Every new season asks us to let go of the one before it, and to step toward something we're genuinely glad is coming.

I think about this a lot in grief and transition coaching. A transition isn't just the practical shift - new schedule, new backpack, new grade, new job, new chapter. It's an ending and a beginning happening in the same breath. The slower mornings end, and a kid who's finally ready for the bigger classroom arrives. A particular version of a child ends, and a new one - one you're excited to meet - begins, sometimes overnight. For parents, for teachers, for anyone whose year bends around September (even in early August), there's a quiet mourning and a real gladness both tucked inside the busyness of "getting back to it."

Transitions are grief and joy standing in the same doorway.

That's not a contradiction - it’s kind of the whole point. You can be genuinely excited for what's ahead and still feel the loss of what's ending. Both are true. Neither cancels the other out. If grief is unexpressed joy - love with nowhere left to go - then a transition is often the moment that love needs somewhere new to land, and hasn't found it yet.

The joy deserves the same attention we give the grief. It's easy to let excitement pass by unspoken - that pride, that hope, folded quietly into logistics instead of said out loud. We name the loss because it's harder to see. But the excitement is just as real, and it's worth saying plainly, not just implying through a first-day photo: I am genuinely happy about this. Naming the joy on purpose - not as a footnote to the grief, but as its own true thing - is part of what lets both live in you at once instead of one quietly outweighing the other.

A few ways to move through a transition instead of just through it:

• Name the ending, not just the beginning. Before you fill out the calendar, take a moment to say what's actually over. "The slow mornings are done." "That stage of parenting a five-year-old is done." Naming it doesn't make it sadder - it makes it real, which is usually a relief.
• Name the excitement just as directly. Say what you're actually looking forward to, in specific terms - not "it'll be good for them" but "I'm excited to see who she becomes in that classroom." Give the joy its own sentence instead of folding it into logistics.
• Expect the ambush - in both directions. Transitions often don't hit in the big moments (the first drop-off) but in small, unguarded ones - a wave of grief while folding away last year's too-small shoes, or a wave of pure delight watching them run for the bus. Let both catch you without judgment.
• Give the in-between its own space. You don't have to be fully in the old season or fully in the new one right away. There's a threshold in between, and it's allowed to take longer than a weekend.
• Ask what wants to come with you. Not everything from the last season needs to be left behind. Some rhythms, some closeness, some ways of being together are worth carrying forward on purpose.

Whatever transition you're standing in this month - a child heading back to class, (or to college) a schedule resetting, a life stage quietly closing - it's worth pausing long enough to say both out loud: what you're grieving, and what you're genuinely excited about. You don't have to pick one, and neither one needs to stay quiet to make room for the other.

If you're in a season of transition and could use a companion for it, I'd be honored to walk alongside you — through transition coaching, or simply a conversation.

The particular shape of each goodbye

I have been sitting with people in their grief my whole life. More intentionally for the last twenty years, as a pastor. More specifically still, for the last two years, as a grief coach. Across all of it, there's one thing I can say with real confidence: it is never the same reaction. Two people can lose almost the same thing - a parent, a spouse, a friend - and grieve in completely different ways. One goes quiet. One gets furious. One can't stop moving. One can't move at all.

That much, most people expect. What surprises people more is this: it isn't even the same within one person.

I have watched the same person move through loss after loss in their life, and each loss has its own weather. The grief for a parent doesn't look like the grief for a sibling. The grief for a spouse doesn't look like the grief for a friend. Even two parents, lost years apart, can be mourned in almost opposite ways by the very same person. Quiet the first time, and loud the second. Or the reverse. 

For a long time, I would watch how we move as we assume grief is something that happens in a person - a process they move through, a set of stages, a timeline that gets faster or slower with practice. But if grief were really about the person, it would look roughly consistent from loss to loss. It doesn't. Which tells me grief isn't primarily about the person grieving. It's about the specific, particular shape of the bond that's gone.

You are not grieving "loss" in the abstract. You are grieving this relationship - its particular texture, what it gave you that nothing else gave you, what it asked of you that nothing else asked, what's now left unfinished because that one person is the only one who could have finished it with you. A parent who raised you and a parent who disappointed you leave two different absences, even if it's the same parent. A friend you saw weekly for thirty years and a friend you loved from a distance leave two different absences, even though both are real.

This quietly dismantles something people often expect of themselves: that grief should get easier to do, the more times you've done it. That having survived one loss should make you better equipped for the next - more efficient, less thrown, further along some invisible curve of expertise. I don't think that's how it works. Each grief is a first-time experience, because each relationship was a first-time relationship. There is no such thing as graduating into expertise at your own grief. You can be practiced at surviving loss in general and still be entirely undone by this particular one, because this one is asking something none of the others asked.

I think this matters most for the people standing next to a griever, trying to help. It's tempting to pattern-match - I remember how they were last time, so I know what they'll need this time. But if grief is relational rather than personal, last time doesn't reliably predict this time. The person you're sitting with may need something completely different than they needed a year ago, even though they are, on paper, "going through the same thing." The task isn't to remember and apply. The task is to actually watch. Actually ask. Actually meet this grief, freshly, as if you'd never walked beside this person's grief before - because in a real sense, you haven't. This one hasn't happened before either.

I haven't buried someone extra close to myself, so I hold all of this loosely - as something I've noticed, not something I've lived. But sitting alongside so many people, in so many different griefs, has taught me at least this much: love differently, grieve differently. Every relationship, its own touchpoint. Every loss, its own first time.

Sturdy Enough

I have traveled all my life. Nationally, internationally. By plane, by boat, by train. In groups, with family, alone. I know how to move through the world - how to read a departures board in a language I don't speak, how to talk my way onto an earlier flight (well not lately don’t get excited), how to sit still in an airport for six hours without losing my mind. Solo travel, in particular, I am good at. I trust my instincts. I make a decision and I move.

None of that prepared me for traveling with my seventeen-year-old daughter.

It's not the itinerary that's hard. It's not the packing or the layovers or the inevitable gate change. It's that she questions me - my route, my timing, my read on a situation - and I feel myself second-guessing decisions I would otherwise make without a flicker of doubt. Decades of competence, and one raised eyebrow from someone I love can still unsteady me.

For a while I told myself a tidy story about why: she pushes on me because I'm safe. Somewhere I read - or maybe just decided - that this is how it works. A teenager on the edge of leaving needs to test whether her own judgment is allowed to exist next to someone else's. She needs proof that she can disagree with me and the relationship still holds. I am, in that story, something like a trellis - not the target of the pushing, just the sturdy thing she's growing against. A trellis doesn't take it personally when the vine pushes on it. The pushing is the point. It's how the vine finds its own shape.

I still think that's true. I've watched enough people, in enough kinds of grief and change, to trust that pattern. It probably is safer to test your own compass against someone who loves you unconditionally than against a stranger who won't. In a year she'll be making these calls with professors and roommates and people who don't already know her heart. Right now, she gets to rehearse on me.

But the real part I don't want to skip past, is the part that lives underneath the theory: I wanted to be her friend (I know, I know…this will come later when she is an adult…I just need to be kind and true and dependable…but we are not in the future…we are in the present) And instead of being a friend…, I am the one she rails against, precisely because I am safe enough to rail against. And even though the explanation is true. It is NOT quite a comfort. It doesn't erase the ache of watching your child brace against you instead of leaning into you - even when you understand exactly why, even when some clinical, pastoral part of you knows it's healthy and expected and even a little bit an honor.

I don't think that tension resolves. I'm not sure it's supposed to. Whatever it is that I imagined I would be to her… I am her safe target instead, and I don't fully know how to feel about that yet.

What I do know is where breath comes in.

There is a half-second, on a train platform or in a rental car or standing in a security line, when she questions a decision I've already made - and I feel the whole old instinct rise up to defend it, or worse, to cave just to keep the peace. That half-second is where the practice actually lives. Not in the itinerary. Not in being right about the gate. In the breath between her challenge and whatever I do next. One breath, and I can choose whether I'm defending my competence or making room for hers.

Somewhere in my body, I can feel exactly where this lands - a tightening in the jaw, a held breath, a flush of something that wants to prove itself. I've learned, slowly, to notice that before I act from it. That's not a travel skill. It's the same skill I'd ask anyone to practice with a parent, a partner, anyone whose questioning of you cuts closer than a stranger's ever could.

I used to think I was only good at traveling alone. I'm starting to think that's not quite it. Solo travel and companioned travel are two different skills, and I've simply spent forty years building one of them and only just started building the other. That's not failure. That's just where I am - a beginner, again, at something I thought I'd already mastered.

She only pushes back because she's watching that closely. Because she trusts me enough to test her own read against mine. Because she is, in her own way, getting ready to leave — and something in both of us already knows it.

I don't have a clean ending for this one. Just this: I am learning to breathe through being loved in a form I didn't expect, on my way to a departure neither of us is ready for yet.