After several years working with Grief Dialogues, through the coursework for a Grief Coach Certification program, and the writing process of working with Elizabeth Coplan on our new book “Out of Grief Comes Art,” I’ve come to understand that grief is not something to fear or fret. It is an integral part of our life journey. Grief is the collection of emotional and physiological feelings we get when our love has nowhere to go. It is that love, that emotion, asking to be acknowledged.
Grief is not a problem to be solved, nor a pathology to be corrected. It is a relational process between what was and what is. It is the gateway that delivers us from who we were to who we are becoming. When we try to rush it, contain it, or make it behave, we don’t shorten it…we fracture it. What “heals” us (for lack of a better word) is not resolution, but witnessing.
One of the most clarifying distinctions for me has been understanding grief as an inner response, mourning as its outward expression, and bereavement as the state of having lost. That language matters. It explains why so many people feel “stuck.” Especially in our American culture, people are often never given permission, language, or space to mourn what they lost, or even to name it as grief in the first place
Additionally I have realized that grief is not a linear process. Many people have heard of “The Stages of Grief,” (Kübler-Ross’s Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) but in reality, it comes in waves. It spirals and returns. Grief revisits us not because we are failing, but because we are still in a relationship with our memory, with our identity, and with our love. Each return carries different information. The goal of those going through the grieving process is not to “move on”—contrary to popular belief—but to move with it, allowing integration to happen over time.
I have also come to understand on a much deeper level how profoundly grief lives in the body. Grief is emotional, spiritual, AND physiological. It shows up in breath, digestion, sleep, immunity, fatigue, and nervous system regulation, which can become locked into a sustained state of fight or flight, or overwhelmed to the point of collapse. When someone says, “I don’t know what I’m feeling, but my body is falling apart,” I now hear that as grief speaking in its native language. The body remembers what the mind cannot yet name.
As part of the Grief Dialogues family, I support those experiencing our artful and theatrical experiences with presence and compassion before interpretation and meaning-making.
Perhaps the most important evolution in my thinking has been around what counts as grief. Not all grief comes from death. Some of the deepest griefs are invisible or disconnected from the generally accepted definition of grief: identity loss, estrangement, career collapse, spiritual rupture, unrealized futures, relationships that never became what they needed to be. When these losses go unrecognized, grief becomes disenfranchised and that silence compounds the pain. Naming these experiences as grief helps bridge the gap between what we are feeling and a way to move forward.
I am becoming increasingly clear about my role in this work. Our role at Grief Dialogues is not about fixing, diagnosing, or leading someone out of pain. We are a beacon holding a steady, attuned presence while someone learns to live with their loss in a new way or understand it from a new perspective. We are not a guide with a map, but rather a witness and a companion.
The ache of grief is simply love with nowhere to go, a fierce, unmet emotion that demands acknowledgement. We do not need resolution or closure; we need relationship. The ultimate act of healing is to find companions, whether in art, community, or just our own quiet presence, who can offer witnessing to this process. Grief changes identity and rearranges priorities, but when we allow ourselves to move with it, we learn to carry that powerful, displaced love not as a burden, but as an integral, honored part of who we are becoming.
