There is a particular cruelty in the way we are taught to speak about grief — as though it is a journey that ends somewhere, a process that, if attended to correctly, resolves into something clean. As though there is a version of you on the other side of it who no longer carries the weight. Who has arrived.
It does not work that way. And the insistence that it should is one of the loneliest things about grief.
"Grief does not end. It changes shape. It asks something different of us in each season we carry it through."
What grief actually asks of us is not resolution. It asks us to learn the practice of returning. To the body. To the breath. To the life that is still here, even when it feels unrecognisable. To ourselves — not as we were before the loss, but as we are now, changed by it, still standing.
Why we resist calling it a practice
The word practice implies something ongoing. Something that does not have an endpoint. And we do not want grief to be ongoing. We want it to be a season we pass through, a wound that closes, a chapter that ends. The culture we live in is built around productivity and resolution. Grief fits into neither.
But when we resist the ongoing nature of grief, we resist grief itself. We push it down. We perform recovery before it has happened. We apologise for still being in it. We compare our timelines to others and find ourselves wanting. And underneath all of that performance is the exhaustion of someone who is still grieving and has been told — implicitly or explicitly — that they should be finished by now.
You are not behind. There is no schedule. Grief moves at the pace of the love that preceded it.
What returning actually looks like
Returning is not the same as recovering. Recovery implies going back to what was — and what was no longer exists. The person you were before the loss, the life you had before the loss, is not what you are returning to.
Returning is smaller than that. It is noticing that you are still breathing. That something made you laugh, briefly, and you did not feel guilty for it. That you got through a day without the grief swallowing all of it. That you are, somehow, still here — and that being here might mean something, even now.
Some days the return is enormous. Some days it is nothing more than making tea and sitting with it. Both count. Neither is more valid than the other.
The role of grief coaching in the practice
Grief coaching does not try to end your grief. It holds space for you within it. It walks alongside you in the practice of returning — not pushing you toward a destination that does not exist, but sitting with you in the reality of where you are.
What I offer in our sessions is presence. Not answers. Not a timeline. Not a promise that it gets easier in a way that is measurable or predictable. What I offer is someone who will not flinch at the weight of what you are carrying, who will hold it with you, and who knows from both training and lived experience that you are not broken by your grief. You are being changed by it. That is different.
The practice of returning is yours. I am here to walk it with you.