The Shape of Grief

My dog passed away a few months ago.

This is why my blog and Instagram posts have been absent. I haven’t really had the heart to generate anything from the many things my mind has been circulating. My time and attention have been tied up tending to the daily necessities of life and tending to the pain of loss.

The journey of grief is different for everyone, and different every time we move through it. This time, I’ve become more reclusive and internal, and I’m okay with that.

I’ve learned to listen to what my body and mind need and to honor those needs rather than push them aside.

Because I’ve also learned that grief doesn’t go away simply because we don’t pay attention to it. It waits. It sits quietly beneath the surface, waiting for us to acknowledge it and begin the slow process of feeling and tending to what it carries before what has been left unattended begins to surface in unexpected ways.

One way I’ve found to be with grief is through creative practices. I like to write prose or poetry, paint, or do quick little inky color investigations, letting color touch into what words cannot. Some days, I like to listen to music that touches me deeply, dance, or go for long contemplative walks in nature. Sometimes I build an altar that gives form to an emotion I am working with, as a way of honoring its presence.

And then there is the stillness of meditation, which allows what needs to be felt to simply be with me. Sentences often come to me in meditation that I then build poems around.

This is one such poem:

No Apologies

I haven’t felt like going out lately.

I refuse to be the good soldier,

to do what is required of me.

Fatigues will not serve me now,

so I refuse to put them on.

In place of combat clothes,

I wear the grief that is present.

It slips over me

like a veil, separating me

from life outside,

making me invisible

to others and to myself.

This isolation is oddly welcoming.

It is my consolation today—

a spacious place

where I can simply be,

beyond the gaze

and grasp of others.

This taking care of only myself is new,

an act of defiance

with years of self-denial behind it,

making it feel feral and untamed.

A wildness, though,

that is beginning to be the place

that feels most domestic,

most home.

I offer no apologies.

A loss can also awaken memories of all kinds of past losses. This is not uncommon. The body remembers that pain, and sometimes a new loss opens the door to what has been waiting there all along, especially when those earlier losses were never held or cared for.

I think that is part of what has been happening for me.

This grief has not only been about losing my dog. It has touched other losses, other endings, other places in me that were never quite finished grieving or even recognized as needing to be grieved. The body has its own memory, and it does not always distinguish between the loss that happened yesterday and the ones that happened years ago.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons grief asks so much of us. It isn't linear. It doesn't move neatly from beginning to end. It circles back. It deepens. It surprises us.

And sometimes, it asks us to withdraw.

To become quiet.

To stop performing wellness.

To refuse the fatigues.

There is a wisdom in that refusal.

I am learning that grief does not always need to be moved through quickly or transformed into something meaningful. Sometimes it simply needs to be given a place to live for a while.

A spacious place.

A wild place.

A place where we don't have to apologize for what we cannot yet do, or for who we become while we are grieving.

Grief never really goes away. It only changes shape.

And perhaps part of grieving is learning to recognize its new shape, to listen for what it is asking of us, and to make room for it, gently, patiently, in its own time.

For now, I am listening.

And slowly I am finding my voice again.