Grief Can Feel Like a Foreign Land

Learning permission, daily practices, and sovereignty in the landscape of loss

Grief can feel like a foreign land, especially if you’ve never been there before. For some, it’s the loss of a grandmother or a beloved friend. For others, it’s the passing of a public figure who embodied kindness and generosity. Either way, grief can hit hard, and it doesn’t get talked about enough.

I’ve had my share of losses. The first one that struck me personally was at thirteen, when a close family friend died of cancer. She had been a strong, loving presence in my life, someone who taught me unconditional love and the vital difference between “what you did was wrong” and “you are wrong.” I didn’t get that from my family—but I got it from her.

After she died, my mother, a librarian and a deeply sensitive woman, got us both copies of On Death and Dying by Kübler-Ross. She and I both read and it, becoming a little mom-and-me book club. That was during a time when I had already lost a 17-year-old cousin in a drowning accident. Those two deaths shaped me deeply, and we talked about them in the context of that book, and our sense of loss.

The grief and loss were real, but so was my talking to them whenever I wanted to. Mom was glad I felt that way but didn’t allow herself to think of it as my being psychic or a medium. That could have asked too much of her world view.

There were more losses. Funerals were part of growing up Catholic in a big family. Some were strangers to me, but meaningful to my mother. Later came assassinations and public tragedies that pierced me to the core, and the deaths of friends my age—through overdoses or other causes. Eventually, my parents passed away thirty years ago, within a few years of each other.

When my father died I went to grief counseling. One exercise the counselor gave me was to write down every death that had impacted me. At that point, I was in my mid thirties and counted 25 deaths that mattered to me.

That’s not typical unless you’ve lived through war or catastrophe. I hadn’t. Mine were the everyday losses — friends, family, mentors — yet their accumulation was anything but ordinary. They burned away illusions, and grief itself became a pronounced spiritual teacher. Grief became a village I knew well.

What baffled me most after my father’s death was how reactive I was—how the tears wouldn’t stop, how I didn’t want to do anything.

I felt as if the Earth had lost its center of gravity, or at least I had at any rate.

It was so different from when my mother died. I’d had a better relationship with her, and I was at her side when she left. That was maybe the most glorious, amazing experience of my life—watching someone, in her words, be born into everlasting life. But that’s a story for another day.

Over time, I discovered practices that helped.

One was simple: sitting for ten minutes a day, looking out the window at the Olympic Mountains. No music, no distractions, just noticing. It wasn’t a test. Sometimes I tracked the snow line day to day, sometimes I couldn’t remember what I’d seen the day before.  The lesson was: just look, just notice, just breathe for 10 minutes.

Counting life by something other than manmade things like clocks.

This by itself was very stabilizing; reassuring.

At the end of those ten minutes, I’d imagine taking myself off the meat hook I kept putting myself on. I’d had a life-long habit of getting myself  “on the hook,” for mostly imagined shortcomings. A heavy lay over from my Irish Roman Catholic upbringing.

Some days it worked, some days it didn’t. Now I see it as a trauma response that kept me stuck. But the attempt mattered. That daily practice gave me permission to stop measuring myself by clocks and other’s judgements and expectations.

Grief doesn’t just arrive with death. It comes with all transitions—ending jobs, changing relationships, letting go of fantasies about how life “should” be. Facing those illusions can be painful, because we liked them. But grief has a way of peeling away what doesn’t belong, reshaping us from the inside out.

It’s messy, but it’s also soul-satisfying.

It’s the deep work of becoming more fully yourself. And you can trust the process. There are landmarks in the land of grief. There is a container for it. And you don’t have to do it alone.

So give yourself permission to quit what no longer fits. Take breaks. Fire the habits, the shows, the routines that no longer serve you. You can always rehire anything tomorrow if you want to. Listen to your body—notice the tightening, notice the relaxing. Let that guide you like your North Star.

Grief is demanding, but you were built for it. It’s part of your capacity to love. And it’s also an opening into more freedom, more wholeness, more life.

Grief, or even the unnamed heaviness you can’t explain, is a place where support matters. If you’d like, explore my website, and reach out with questions. A private session can open space for clarity and healing.