The widening circles of grief

Recognising loss beyond bereavement and embracing grief in all its forms

When I first came to grief work, it was through the portal of a deep personal bereavement. It was the type of loss that people could see and touch. The suicide of my Mum so visceral and permanent that it felt natural, necessary, for others to name my experience as 'grief'.

And yet, I would have said that I had been grieving for years. Perhaps the difference then being that my external world was matching my inner one.

For years I had been grieving the loss of normality throughout my Mum's depression. I had been grieving the comfort of home. I had been grieving the longing for a feeling of safety in my body. I had been grieving feeling like a totally unhinged 22-year-old compared to all my friends.

But, as the years have gone on and I've learned more about grief tending with Francis Weller's gates of grief, I have since realised that I had been grieving long before that too.

At school, I'd been grieving a sense of true sisterhood and belonging. Caught somewhere between teenage anxiety and all girls school culture, I often found myself wondering — 'surely it was all meant to be more kind than this?' I look back now able to name my grief for an adolescence without connection, elders, wisdom and initiations. I was longing to feel my place as a daughter of the earth.

Later, I began my first corporate job working as an Organisational Psychologist at Deloitte (if you can imagine?!). Here, I was grieving the whole system entirely. I was grieving the emptiness I felt having to relentlessly push through late nights and early mornings against the screams of my cyclical body. I was grieving the longing for my own gifts to be witnessed and shared, rather than ignored or perhaps worse—never even considered to begin with. I was grieving the small talk, the banter, the sexism, and let's not forget the timesheets. I was grieving the quarterly meetings that only seemed to focus on growth, always more growth!

As the years rolled on and I've paid closer attention to our world, I recognise my grief everywhere. My grief lives in the single tree standing alone, dying without its ecosystem close by. My grief lives in the children's cries and in the heartbroken mothers, especially those in war-torn countries. My grief lives in our polluted waters and in the diminishing number of nightingales returning each year.

When I talk about my work at The Grief Space all too often I notice people either putting themselves firmly inside or outside of this word 'grief'. And while tending to our deep personal bereavements will always be a huge part of this work, the truth is that I'm here for the widest, most universal, all-reaching, all-encompassing definition of grief. The type of grief space that we're all in, always, because that is what it means to be truly alive and paying attention.

You are welcome here if your grief is new or ancient, or whether it was never yours to begin with.

You are welcome here if your grief is tangible, or totally unseen. If your grief is personal or woven into the collective.

You are welcome here if you're grieving and you don't know why. If your grief is emotional or physical, or both—because it often is. If your grief is complicated, messy, angry. If your grief is layered, infused into our systems of oppression.

You are welcome here if your grief is selfish. If your grief is love unbound. If your grief makes no sense, to me or even to you. If you don't yet know what grief means.

You are welcome here.