How Do We Sit With Grief?
Finding compassion in complexity: how to sit with grief without rushing to fix it.
When Grief Pulls Up a Chair
Some days carry more than twenty-four hours should be expected to hold.
Today is one of those days.
Forty-two years ago today, on August 25, I stood beside a man and promised to build a life with him. I could not have known then what the next 25 years would contain.
The marriage became abusive. There was violence. There was fear. There were years of surviving circumstances no one should have to survive.
And yet, when I look back at that chapter of my life, I cannot simply wish it out of existence.
Because from that marriage came my sons.
Two human beings I love beyond measure.
That is one of the complicated truths about trauma and grief that we don't talk about enough:
Sometimes beautiful things grow in terrible places.
And sometimes the people we love carry pieces of what happened there, too.
Children witness more than adults sometimes want to believe. Violence doesn't remain neatly contained between two people. It moves through a household. It changes the emotional weather of a home.
Children learn from what they see, what they hear, what they fear, and what they must do to survive it.
Years later, everyone may leave the house.
But sometimes pieces of the house leave with them.
So what do we do with an anniversary like this?
Do I grieve the young woman who stood there 42 years ago?
Do I mourn the years that followed?
Do I celebrate the children who came from that life?
Do I feel anger?
Gratitude?
Sadness?
Relief?
Maybe all of them.
Perhaps honoring our past doesn't require deciding whether it was good or bad. Perhaps we can simply tell the truth about it.
It happened.
It hurt.
There was also love.
There were things worth carrying forward and things that should have ended generations ago.
All of those truths can exist together.
And Then Grief Arrives Again
As if memory weren't already heavy enough, today brought other losses into the room.
The loss of someone whose life represented something very different to me—a woman whose legacy reminds me that influence doesn't have to be measured by how much we accumulate.
Some people leave behind fortunes.
Others leave behind evidence that kindness mattered. That generosity mattered. That bringing joy into people's lives mattered. That using one's success to lift others mattered.
Those are the lives that make me think about the word legacy differently.
What will remain after us?
Not just what will be written beside our names.
What will remain inside other people because we were here?
And today, alongside all of that, came another kind of grief.
The loss of a friend.
Another friend.
The second in only two months.
There comes a point when grief begins to feel less like an event and more like someone who keeps pulling up a chair at the kitchen table.
And perhaps that is when we have to learn how to sit with it.
We Are So Quick to Ask Grief to Leave
Our culture doesn't always know what to do with grief.
We send flowers. We attend funerals. We say, “I'm sorry for your loss.”
And then, eventually, there is an unspoken expectation that life should resume.
But grief doesn't own a calendar.
It can arrive while washing dishes.
It can appear inside a song.
It can sit beside us on an anniversary.
It can come through the smell of someone's favorite food.
It can return years later when we suddenly understand something about the person—or ourselves—that we weren't capable of understanding when the loss first occurred.
And grief isn't reserved for death.
We grieve relationships.
We grieve childhoods.
We grieve homes.
We grieve versions of ourselves.
We grieve opportunities.
We grieve the years we spent surviving.
Sometimes we even grieve the life we might have lived had something been different.
Those losses deserve acknowledgment, too.
Maybe We Don't Need to Fix Grief
I've been thinking today about what it means to sit with grief.
Not conquer it.
Not overcome it.
Not turn it into an inspirational lesson before we're ready.
Just sit.
Maybe grief doesn't always need an answer.
Maybe it needs a chair.
Maybe we make tea.
Maybe we cry.
Maybe we tell stories.
Maybe we light a candle.
Maybe we walk outside and put our hands against an old tree.
Maybe we cook someone's favorite meal.
Maybe we paint.
Maybe we laugh at something they once did and then cry because we'll never see them do it again.
Maybe we allow ourselves to remember without deciding what the memory is supposed to mean.
There is something deeply compassionate about allowing grief to exist without demanding that it become productive.
Honoring What Was Without Living There
There is another lesson I am sitting with today.
Honoring the past doesn't mean returning to it.
I can acknowledge the young woman who married 42 years ago without wanting her life back.
I can grieve what she endured without allowing those years to define everything that came afterward.
I can love the sons who came from that marriage while acknowledging the environment that hurt all of us.
I can wish certain things had been different without wishing away everything that came from them.
Healing allows us to hold complexity.
We don't have to turn our histories into fairy tales.
And we don't have to turn them entirely into nightmares, either.
Sometimes healing simply means becoming strong enough to look backward and say:
That was part of my story. It is not the whole story.
What Do We Leave Behind?
Death has a way of asking uncomfortable questions of the living.
What are we doing with our time?
Who knows that we love them?
What are we postponing?
Where are we withholding kindness?
What are we building that will outlive us?
What will people remember about how they felt in our presence?
I don't think legacy has much to do with fame.
Most of us will never have buildings named after us.
But we leave legacies every day.
In our children.
In our students.
In the people we feed.
In the people we encourage.
In the person who remembers that we believed in them when nobody else did.
In art.
In stories.
In gardens.
In communities.
In the ways we choose to interrupt cycles of harm instead of passing them forward.
Maybe one of the greatest legacies we can leave is simply this:
There was more love in the world because I was here.
Tonight, I Will Let It All Be Here
I don't have a beautiful ending for today.
Maybe I don't need one.
Today contains 42 years ago.
It contains two sons.
It contains violence and survival.
It contains people who are gone.
It contains another goodbye that came far too soon.
It contains gratitude.
Anger.
Love.
Memory.
Sadness.
And somehow, it also contains tomorrow.
So tonight, I am not going to ask myself to resolve any of it.
I am going to let grief sit beside me.
I will honor the woman I was.
I will honor the people I have lost.
I will honor what was beautiful.
I will tell the truth about what was painful.
And I will remember that grief exists because something mattered.
Someone mattered.
Some part of our life mattered.
Perhaps that is why grief and love so often occupy the same chair.
One says, “I miss you.”
The other says, “You mattered enough to be missed.”
And maybe, for tonight, that is enough.
