A gentle note before you read: If you are grieving at the moment, come to these words gently. Grief has its own rhythm, and you do not have to make sense of everything today. Read what feels comforting, pause when you need to, and let your own way of grieving be enough.

Grieving is a skill.

Perhaps not a skill we would ever choose to practise, and certainly not one we hope to become accomplished at, but grief asks something of us. It asks us to learn how we respond to loss, how we make room for pain, and how we gradually carry what cannot be changed.

There is no single correct way to grieve.

Some people cry easily. Tears arrive almost before words do. Others cry occasionally, unexpectedly, perhaps weeks or months later when a song plays, a familiar scent drifts through a room, or someone says a name aloud.

And some people do not cry very much at all.

None of these responses measures the depth of love or loss.

Our bodies and minds have different ways of processing what has happened. For one person grief may need stillness. For another, it needs movement. Walking, running, gardening, dancing, swimming, cleaning, stretching or simply wandering outside can give the body somewhere to place an emotion that feels too large to contain.

Sometimes grief needs words.

A journal may become the place where the things that cannot yet be spoken are allowed to exist. Letters can be written to someone who has died, to the person we once were, or even to grief itself. There does not need to be a polished conclusion. Grief rarely follows tidy sentences.

Sometimes it needs creativity.

A painting, a piece of music, a poem, a photograph, a collage, a knitted blanket, a garden planted in someone’s memory. Creative expression can allow grief to take another form when ordinary language feels inadequate.

Sometimes our grieving tool is another person.

There are moments when grief needs to be witnessed rather than solved. Sitting beside someone who can tolerate our sadness without rushing us, correcting us or trying to make us feel better can be profoundly healing. We may need to tell the same story repeatedly. We may need to speak about the person we miss. We may need companionship without conversation at all.

And sometimes grief needs solitude.

Learning our own grieving methods can help us recognise what we need instead of judging ourselves for not grieving in the way we imagine we should.

We might begin by noticing:

Do I need to speak or be quiet?
Do I need to move or rest?
Do I need company or solitude?
Do I need to cry, create, write, pray, remember or simply breathe?

The answer may change from day to day.

This is part of the skill of grieving too: recognising that grief moves.

It can be fierce one morning and almost absent by afternoon. We may laugh and then feel guilty for laughing. We may experience moments of peace followed by an unexpected wave of longing. Anniversaries, birthdays, ordinary Tuesdays, supermarket aisles and pieces of music can reopen rooms inside us we thought had become quiet.

This does not necessarily mean we are moving backwards.

Grief is not a staircase.

It is closer to learning the geography of a changed world.

Over time we begin to discover where the difficult places are, where the memories live, what helps us when a wave arrives, and where small places of rest can still be found.

Being with grief therefore requires compassion.

There may be days when the most skilful thing we can do is cry.

Another day it may be going for a walk.

Another may be making dinner, answering an email, laughing with someone we love or spending an afternoon doing absolutely nothing.

Grieving does not always look like grieving.

Perhaps one of the most important things we can learn is our own grief language: the ways our mind, body, heart and spirit naturally attempt to process loss.

And perhaps we can create a small personal grief toolbox from that knowledge.

Not a toolbox designed to make grief disappear, but one that quietly says:

When grief comes, I know some of the ways I can meet it.

There is tenderness in knowing this about ourselves.

Because grief may be something we cannot control, but we can slowly learn how to accompany ourselves through it.

Perhaps that is the skill:

not overcoming grief,

but learning how to remain lovingly present while it moves through us.

💕With reverence for your grief, and gratitude for your presence here 💕