Grief
Grief is what happens when something that mattered is lost. It is one of the most universal human experiences and one of the most under-resourced. There is no timeline, no correct sequence, no proper duration, no tidy way of greving. What there is, instead, is the long work of staying alive while love continues toward something that is no longer here.
If you are reading this carrying grief, in whatever form it has taken, you are not alone, and you are not behind any schedule.
The many shapes grief takes
Grief is not only about death, though death is often the form that gets most readily acknowledged. The losses people bring to us include:
- The death of someone you loved. A parent, a partner, a child, a sibling, a friend, a chosen family member, a grandparent, a former partner, a beloved pet, an ancestor you never met but always felt.
- The end of a relationship through divorce, breakup, estrangement, the slow drift of a friendship, the cutoff with family of origin
- The loss of a pregnancy, of fertility, of the future you thought you would have, of children you wanted and could not have
- The loss of health, capacity, or a version of your body that used to do things easily, including grief about chronic illness and disability
- The loss of home, country, language, faith, community, or way of life
- Coming-out grief, transition grief, identity grief. Losing the version of yourself you had to be in order to survive, even when finally living as yourself is the right choice
- Estrangement grief. The complicated mourning for people who are still alive but no longer in your life, sometimes by your own necessary choice
- Ambiguous loss. When the person is still alive but the relationship is gone, when dementia has taken the parent before the body, when addiction has changed who someone is
- Disenfranchised grief. Grief for relationships that were complicated or hidden, grief the people around you do not recognize as legitimate
- Collective grief. What it is to live through pandemic, displacement, climate catastrophe, ongoing racial violence, mass shootings, and the deaths of people you did not know personally but whose loss reshapes the world
- Intergenerational grief. The losses your ancestors lived through that they did not have time or safety to grieve in the moment, which have traveled forward to you
The cultural context matters
For many of our clients, grief is layered. A recent loss can bring up older losses, a death can bring up earlier estrangement, a body change can bring up earlier grief about the body. The work rarely involves a single loss in isolation.
It also matters that grief does not occur in a vacuum. Many people are grieving within families, workplaces, communities, and systems that do not always know how to make room for loss. Support may lessen long before the grief does. People are often encouraged to return to their routines while still carrying the weight of what has happened. None of this reflects the reality of grief, which often unfolds in its own time and asks something very different of us. The cultural expectation is that grief will resolve, the person will return to normal, and life will continue. None of this matches what grief actually does, or what mourners actually need.
For many BIPOC and immigrant clients, grief is also intergenerational. The losses your ancestors lived through, including colonization, slavery, partition, war, forced migration, residential schools, internment, and the dispossession of land and language, were often not allowed to be metabolized in the generation they happened in. Unmetabolized grief travels. It shows up in the body, in family patterns, in the unexplained heaviness that some of us have carried our whole lives without knowing what it was. Honoring that grief is part of honoring where you come from.
What this work can look like at MLC
At MLC, grief work does not try to move grief along. It tries to be present with grief as it is. In practice, this might include:
- Making space for whatever shape the grief is taking, including the shapes that do not fit any standard description. Numbness is grief. Rage is grief. Laughing inappropriately is grief. Not being able to cry is grief. Crying for months is grief.
- Helping you find the language, the rituals, the rest, the rage, and the relationships that grief needs in order to be witnessed
- Holding the multiple losses that are often present at the same time
- Working with disenfranchised and ambiguous grief, including losses that do not have widely acknowledged scripts
- Holding intergenerational and collective grief alongside personal grief
- Working somatically when the grief is in the body, which it often is. Grief takes up residence in the chest, the throat, the gut, the breath, the way a person walks through a room.
The therapists at MLC do not look away from grief. We do not rush it. We do not require it to be tidy. We make a place where what you have lost is allowed to be what it actually was, and where what you are carrying is allowed to be witnessed. For as long as it takes, alongside someone who is willing to stay.
