Grief and Loss

Your Hardest Hours Come After the House Goes Quiet

The distractions you arranged all day finally run out, and the memories come for you.

You go back over the last conversation looking for the thing you should have said, and over the last days wondering whether you did enough.

Then the question arrives that you’ve never said to anyone: who are you now that they’re gone?

Nobody Gets to Set the Clock on Your Grief

The people who love you started expecting you to be finished with this a while back, and their timetable was never built for your heart.

So you keep the worst of it to yourself to spare them, which leaves you lonely in a room full of people who care about you.

Death isn’t the only loss that does this to you. A marriage ends, or a relationship you counted on goes cold. The life you had pictured for yourself quietly stops being available.

Grief can’t be rushed or fixed, and no one else gets to decide when yours is finished.

Carry Your Loss Without It Running Your Days

What we can work on together is the guilt and the second-guessing that have stacked themselves on top of the loss.

In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy we take the “if only” and the “I should have” and hold them up against what was actually true that day.

Grounding and mindfulness are for the wave that arrives without warning, in a grocery aisle or a parking lot, so you’ll have something to do with your breath until it passes.

And I’ve sat with plenty of people whose grief sent them looking for God, so you’ll tell me how much of that belongs in our work.

You’ll Think of Them and Feel Something Other Than the Ache

Healing will never ask you to let go of them.

The memories start coming back with warmth in them, and you’ll find yourself smiling before your eyes fill.

The “if only” and the “I should have” lose their grip, and the nights get quiet enough to sleep through again.

You’ll make plans again, you’ll laugh with the people still here, and none of it will feel like a betrayal.