Navigating Grief, Loss & Bereavement

My earliest memory is of death. I talk about this experience in Immigration & Cross-Cultural Experiences. What I want you to know is that death was an act of community protection for our home. You don't have to share a specific belief system to see the profound value in honoring life and relationship. That experience shaped how I view grief. Grief is not a clinical pathology to be sanitized, but a fundamental pleasure of being human. 

Grief comes from the intensity of a relationship that once was. Whether you are mourning a person, an object, a phase of life, or a lost opportunity; feeling profound loss makes complete sense when you have woven something deeply into the web of your life. Grief can simply a testament of that devotion.

In a culture that tries to rush people through bereavement, pathologize sadness, or force emotional reality into neat, linear stages, I welcome working with grief. Mortality is a reality we all share. I welcome that reality. As long as I can go back in the known world, loss has been one of the most natural pieces of human relationship. 

In our work, I don't try to "fix" your grief or polish it so you can perform normalcy. You can honor what was lost how it feels natural to you. I can respect the weight of what you are carrying and I comfortable around the many lived realities of grief I have been exposed to. I feel confident together we can navigate what it looks like to live alongside loss on your own terms. 

I know I have spoken as though you must grieve or that grief is felt and not experienced in the body, but I do not know that to be true. Grief has cultural context to it and there are so many cultures. Each family grieves differently, each person, grief is not alike among people and it is incredibly person to person.