We all experience grief. It is universal and unique all at once. Grief is devastating and grief is a gift.
My forthcoming book of poetry, The Gift of Grief, explores my journey through various bouts of grief. It took me a long time to embrace grief rather than fight it or ignore it or work to process it seeking an end date. Grief works on its own time. Embracing it brought me to a place where I could see the gift it brought to my life.
I discovered that grief is something we learn to live with not something we process as a one-and-done. I really wanted to check off items to show progress like it was some kind of task list.
At times I felt like the waves of grief just couldn’t end because as soon as I started feeling settled, I lost someone else, I sometimes felt like the grief was just too much. I began to realize this was probably true for many other people as well.
Between 2020–2024, I grieved the deaths of several friends, myriad extended family members, my father-in-law, my Daddy, and two cats. There were days I felt like I I grieving life itself. Or… that maybe life had become grief.
I did what I do to process pretty much anything. I wrote and then wrote some more. I researched grief, and then wrote some more. I read multiple books including The Grieving Brain by Mary-Francis O’Connor and It’s Ok That You’re Not Ok by Megan Devine trying to figure out why my grief wasn’t finding a nice, neat trajectory.
