Crossing Through Grief
A rite of passage towards meaning & capacity
One year ago my life cracked open.
I slipped into a long winter that lasted about six months.
At once, several things shifted: family structure was rearranged, I was six months postpartum, mineral deficient, my career and sense of self were unraveling, and sleep was scarce. It felt like life as I knew it was collapsing — a plot twist I hadn’t seen coming.
I won’t unpack every intimate detail here, but I want to share what kept me company during that darkness. I picked up Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart and read it over and over — three times in a month — trying to get through days that felt endless.
Her message landed again and again: our culture is not prepared for death in its many forms.
In a hyper-accelerated world that treats progress as the default good, we have few rituals or shared practices for endings, for transitions, for grief.
Seasons pass but rarely do we mark them inwardly. We don’t slow down to mourn the small deaths — the ways relationships end, identities shift, and plans dissolve.
I had thought I understood nature’s lessons and applied them to my life, but grief taught me how little I actually knew about how to grieve.
In the early months I tried every escape — numbing, doing, distracting — anything to get out of the pain quickly. None of it lasted. Eventually I had to sit in the dark, literally and figuratively, and befriend it. I sat with the parts of myself that needed to die.
I returned to memories of being outside in the cold: alone with trees, stripped branches outlined against a pale sky, the peculiar clarity of winter.
Those moments became maps for how to be with loss. Winter taught me to slow, to be patient with what is bare and bleak, and to hold space for what must fall away before new growth can begin.
Over weeks and months I learned the fit of staying — welcoming every unwanted thought and feeling as if inviting a friend to the table. With time, grief’s presence expanded my capacity to see myself and the world more clearly. Illusions about who I was, what I deserved, and where I was headed shattered. That unpredictability felt terrifying and, eventually, liberating.
Nature models this paradox constantly: she is ritual and surprise, calm and fierce, reverent and furious. We learn from her seasonal return — yet we can never be sure how long a winter will last or how harsh a summer will be.
Accepting that death and change are constant has made me more reverent, more compassionate, and more joyful for what is here now. Grief softened me into a tenderness I hadn’t known I could hold.
Perhaps the simplest way to describe the shift is this: grief taught me to live from a quieter center. I stop sweating the small stuff and hold life in broader themes while honoring small, simple daily acts.
And like the cycle of the seasons, there is a faith that from what falls away, something new will unfurl — in its own time.
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