The Shape of Grief

Grief is not a problem to solve, it is a landscape we learn to walk. It has no fixed map, no linear process, no right way to move through it. Sometimes it comes as a quiet ache, other times as a storm that brings us to our knees. In therapy, people often ask, “When will this pain stop?” or “How do I move on?” But perhaps the deeper question is “How can I be with this?” To be with grief, to stay close to it, to breathe with it, to allow it to unfold, is the work of healing. It’s not about getting over loss, but about learning to live with love in new form.

Death as Transformation

Grief and death are inseparable companions, one leads us toward the other, and both ask us to surrender to transformation. My poem, What Happens When We Die, captures that same mystery at the heart of loss and renewal:

As mortal, flawed, vulnerable, and special as we all are,
we must all answer the question of what happens when we die.

Once you’re gone you’re gone, some shout with confidence.
Others aren’t quite so certain and back their own horse each way.
Others still choose their god and version of heaven with certainty.

To look beneath the surface of these beliefs
perhaps reveals a need for comfort,
and the need to cope in a world which is far from certain.
We must all find our own way through.

Whatever happens when we die,
it would be hard for any of us to deny that death transforms.
Death heals old wounds.
Death opens the heart.
Death shows us what’s really important in life.
Death provides the deepest mirror for the soul.

And for the dead, they now know…
they now know and live on beyond the grave,
least not in the hearts of those they leave behind.

The same could be said of grief. It transforms us, even as we resist it. It softens what has been hardened, deepens what was shallow, and breaks open what we thought was fixed.

The Work of 'Being With'

Modern life teaches us to manage, minimise, and distract. But grief does not respond to control. It only responds to companionship — to being met, held, witnessed. Therapy provides a space where grief can simply exist, without being tidied up or explained away. In that space, tears are sacred, silence is allowed, and the ache itself becomes the teacher. To be with grief is to say: “I will not turn away from what hurts. I will sit with it. I will listen.” This act of presence, quiet, courageous, often wordless, is how grief begins to move. When we stop fighting it, it finds its own rhythm, its own wisdom.

The Soul’s Way of Healing

Spiritually, grief reminds us that love and loss are two sides of the same mystery. We grieve because we have loved deeply. To try to avoid grief is, in a sense, to avoid life itself. Many traditions speak of death and grief as thresholds, places where the veil between worlds thins. When we allow ourselves to be fully with grief, we are standing in that threshold: between what was and what will be, between form and essence, between presence and absence. It is here that transformation happens, not by escaping pain, but by allowing love to reshape itself into something new.

What Grief Teaches

Grief teaches us humility — that we are not in control. It teaches compassion — that every being we meet carries invisible losses. And it teaches truth — that everything we cling to is temporary, yet somehow eternal in the heart.
When we are willing to stay with grief, we begin to glimpse the same paradox your poem holds: death transforms. Grief, too, transforms. It breaks us open, but in that breaking, something more real, more tender, more human is born.

Closing Reflection

Perhaps grief is not a season to “get through,” but a teacher we walk beside. Perhaps it doesn’t want to be cured, only accompanied.
The act of being with grief, without fixing, judging, or rushing, is the process of healing.

As Rumi wrote: “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”

In time, that light becomes gentler. It doesn’t erase the loss, but illuminates it, until the love beneath the pain begins to shine again.