Grief isn't meant to be carried alone. It needs witnesses — people who will sit with you in it and not look away. Carried in private, it tends to go brittle, and brittle grief sets one of two ways: into a numbed sort of living, where the joy of being alive is just as much out of reach — or into bitterness. What stops it setting like that is being seen. 

 

So find a place where your tears are welocme - ideally a mix of people and the living world. Being out in nature helps so much more than most people expect.

 

The human heart is meant to break, and the longer you live, the more times it will. 

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It isn't practical, or linear. It's messy. It doesn't make sense, and yet it absolutly does. You don't get over grief, and you don't move through it — you learn to live alongside it. That can feel impossible at times. 

Another reminder: you're not meant to do this alone.

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Grief finds its way to your door in countless forms — losing a person, losing a job, losing a part of yourself — and each of those can happen in so many different ways. There's one flavour of grief when a child dies, another when a sibling does, another when you lose a parent while you're still young, or a partner. There's a whole different flavour for suicide, for sudden and shocking deaths, for accidents and other tragedies — as there is for the long, slow, drawn-out ones, including losing someone before they've died, as with Alzheimer's. And for every kind of loss we've named here, there are hundreds we haven't.

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Supporting Children through Loss