I recently read a piece by one of my favorites, The Old Gray Thinker (@theoldgreythinker), on Substack about retirement and how a career gives you a reason to be seen.

And when your career ends, as in retirement, you lose that nurturing ability to be seen. But the career didn’t end. It evolved.

What was lost wasn’t the work, but the experience of being witnessed. For decades, presence was reflected back through collaboration, conversation, and shared purpose. That kind of recognition affirms more than achievement. It confirms existence in relation to others.

Retirement reveals an unexpected truth. The reward isn’t freedom from responsibility, but the challenge of becoming one’s own witness. Learning to validate effort without applause. Learning to trust meaning without constant reflection.

But the response to that realization wasn’t withdrawal. It was creation.

Grief Dialogues emerged from the understanding that being seen is essential, especially in loss. The work doesn’t just reclaim visibility. It offers it. It builds rooms where grief is spoken and received, where stories are neither rushed nor softened, where someone says, “This happened,” and another answers, “You are seen.”

This is not a retreat from purpose, but a continuation of it. A deeper chapter that recognizes adulthood’s final frontier may not be self-sufficiency alone, but the ability to witness oneself while extending that witnessing to others.

Meaning doesn’t disappear when a career shifts.

It changes form.

As Grief Dialogues starts its 10th year, the work stands as a response to need: the need to be seen in moments of loss, the need for language when words fail, the need for spaces where grief is neither hidden nor hurried. It exists because people need witnesses, and because witnessing, when offered with care and intention, can be a profound act of connection.

The invitation now is simple and urgent. Enter the room. Listen without fixing. Speak when ready. Bear witness to another’s story and allow your own to be witnessed in return. Whether as an audience member, artist, supporter, or partner, this work continues only if more people choose presence over avoidance, and connection over silence.

Are you with me?