16/10/2026
💜💟💜💟💜
For many of us who have endured catastrophic loss, our ground collapses, time crumbles, our very identity is lost, and our world has forever changed. That lasts and lasts and lasts. And one day, there may come a moment, very subtly and almost without noticing, when some of us feel like we can actually hold the grief differently. Some of us even gradually begin to build emotional muscles as we learn to cope with the immensity of this unredeemable loss.
It might feel like this: saying their name happens with a tender smile and tear, or the cereal aisle doesn't drop us to our knees as it once did, or the depth of emptiness in our hearts feels matched only by the depth of the connection to our beloved. And yet, nothing is "fixed” and nothing needs fixing, nothing is "solved” and nothing requires solving.
Slowly, ever so slowly, some awareness begins to form: and we begin to understand how we carry them forward into the world with us. In its deepest form, grief isn't about "letting go” of those we love who died for many of us. It's about taking them with us. It’s about learning to continue this very important relationship that death could never end.
Our relationship with them endures, it just endures in a different form. It's not good enough, and of course we wish for them, and because of that, most of us won't go back to being the person we once were. Our lives, as they once were, are over. Most of us become someone who understands the risk of loving and still chooses to love. Someone who has seen how easily everything can shatter and yet bravely continues to care. Someone who carries the emptiness as proof of existence.
If you're grieving, there’s nothing wrong with you. Not in how fiercely you miss them. Not in your oceans of tears. Not in the way time has unraveled, or how the world can feel both unbearably loud and impossibly silent at the same time. There's nothing wrong with you. There may be, instead, something wrong with a world where someone so precious can leave us so tragically, and we are left to find our way through the wreckage.
And one day, not because we tried harder, not because we “moved on,” but because something in us refused to abandon what will always matter, we begin to slowly, perhaps solemnly, live again.
How? This is a great mystery, one I don’t really understand.
But maybe it's because we know we can carry them forward with us rather than letting them go (whatever that even means).
Maybe an ancient wisdom in us knows that grieving is the natural path of a shattered heart.
Maybe, just maybe, this deep sorrow is a continuance of a love that refuses to be silenced by death.
-Dr. Joanne Cacciatore, March 15, 2025, shared last night with 18 other grievers here with us at a retreat
See how I took my daughter with me on a 210 mile hike in my "summer of awe" post on my blog at Center for Loss and Trauma website
Find support if you need it at MISS Foundation or Selah Carefarm
