Letter to Grief

Dear Grief,

I have known you up close—wrapped around the corners of my eyes, lingering, waiting for a moment to slip in. The tragedy of sudden loss is unfathomable. One question keeps echoing: why me? why me? Why did I lose my loved one? The pain takes over the body and the life. Everything becomes suffocating. The identity that once held one together begins to feel like a garment outgrown. There is a wish—not always conscious—to change into something else, permanently. (This is not metaphor alone; it is a psychic reorganisation.)

I have witnessed you closely, not only in my own life but also in the grief group I once held. Since it was a short-term group, people came and went. What stayed with me were vibrations in my body, tears in my eyes, and the clear knowing that the person before the loss and the person after are never the same. I witnessed those who had known life in a certain way and suddenly wanted to change its course and those who had to live with the aftermath—quietly, in a world that barely took cognizance of what had been taken from them. Dreams and nightmares followed each other closely. Signs were searched for. Communication was imagined, felt, and hoped for. Last wishes were carried forward like fragile threads binding the living to those who were lost. Life thinned out. Meaning faltered. One was left powerless before the violent tides of loss, of losing another and, in some way, losing oneself. Trying to glue back pieces, trying to fill an emptiness that does not want to be filled. (This is affective and somatic work, not cognitive adjustment.)

Grief is not limited to death. People lose people in life in many ways—through separation, illness, betrayal, distance, and silence. Very important people. But death makes loss unmistakable. It leaves no room for negotiation. It announces itself with finality.

Why do I use the word tragedy? Because nothing prepares you. Knowing that death is the only truth does not take away its power to shake you to the core. I listened to sadness—utter sadness. Not so much denial, but ways of coping with a reality that has become unbearable. Just because someone ceases to exist in physical reality does not mean they immediately find a place in psychic reality. That shift takes time. It arrives in fragments.

In small, ordinary moments.

A sudden urge to share good news, let me call my mother, followed by silence and a tear.

A need to ask, Dad, what should I do now? Dad?

A reflex to check, does my child need something from me? just met with an empty feeling in the stomach,

Or a lifetime lived with a partner; now it is finally time to enjoy life, but all that remains is time, and no one to share it with.

I keep asking myself: what does one do in grief? I read theories. Some help me understand what changes, how one learns to carry the person who is gone rather than lose them entirely.

My experience has taught me one thing: show up, stay, and witness. LISTEN!!

Grief insists on the here and now. It does not remain in the past; it erupts in the present. It shapes how one enters relationships, how one withdraws, how closeness is negotiated, how trust is offered or withheld. It demands the shedding of an old identity and confronts the possibility—often unwanted—of a new life path. It forces the hardest questions into the open: What is the purpose of living now? Why continue doing what once made sense?

Perhaps this sounds like romanticising grief. But I think it is something else—a struggle to survive it. To sit with the fact that a person can cease to exist and yet the world expects you to go on. Especially when others do not know how to respond to loss, when they hurry meaning, offer reassurance, or turn away.

Grief (Desconsuelo) Eduardo Kingsman, 1981

I have read many theories. I use them in my work. But with grief, again and again, I find that what is most needed is quieter than explanation: authentic presence, honest connection, and the courage to stay and listen. (Holding, not fixing.)

Part 2: (Theory and understanding later; stay with the emotional cast for now)

Loss, in itself, is not pathological. It is an inevitable consequence of attachment. Grief is the psychic response to that rupture, the work through which the mind attempts to live with an absence that has become structurally present. As Freud observed, “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty” (1917). What is lost is not only the person, but the relational world organised around them.