When grief has nowhere to go, it can show up in sudden tears, a short temper and a heaviness that rest doesn’t fix. This book gives your grief a regular time and place, one morning a month by the water with a friend beside you, so it stops spilling into the rest of your life.
"Through the sacred space you help create, and being able to talk out loud with you as this grief shifts and changes, my connection to spirit and the love of its expression is rekindling. There is still pain and confusion to work through, but I feel safer giving myself the time to go through what is necessary and not try to rush or push it away. I have so much appreciation for what you offer a person struggling with loss."
It might be a parent who died. It might be a marriage that ended, a friendship that thinned out without a fight, or a version of yourself you set down so everyone else could keep going. Each one got filed in the same place: later. After the school year. After the holidays. Once everyone else is okay.
Then someone asks a kind question and your throat closes. Or you snap at someone who didn't deserve it, and the size of it surprises you. Some mornings just start flat, for no reason you can point to.
The voice in your head has its lines ready. "I should be over this by now." "Others have it so much worse." "I don't want to burden anyone." "I'll deal with it when things calm down."
If any of that sounds familiar, you're not alone, and you're not broken. You've been doing what capable women do, which is getting everything done. And nobody stops a woman who is getting everything done to ask how she's feeling.
Your grief has no appointment. Nothing in your week expects it and no morning belongs to it, so it takes the first opening it finds. I call this the Later Pile. It keeps growing for one reason: later is the moment that never comes.
Give it time is the most reasonable advice there is. Stay busy, keep your routines, let the days do their slow work. In the raw early weeks, simply functioning is a real feat, and I admire every woman who has kept a household upright that way.
Grief doesn't dissolve with time, though. It settles. It moves into the shoulders, the jaw, the short temper, the tiredness that sleep never quite reaches. Because it's quiet, it's easy to mistake for healing.
Malidoma Somé, the Dagara teacher and author from Burkina Faso, described what his elders saw in westerner colonizers who did not regularly tend to their grief, is that the grief becomes frozen. Frozen grief holds the individual in a limiting, dehumanizing state where they are not able to make life-giving choices for themselves and their community.
The other half of the myth comes from inside: others have it worse. It is true that you can always find another who is suffering more than you. Yet, comparing doesn't lighten anyone's load. Your grief is yours to express. By tending to your grief, you may find new guidance, connections, and new paths.
I tried the sensible things. For years I wrote artist pages in the dark early mornings, and the journal gave me new insight. Then I'd close my journal to enter into the day, and the same weight was sitting exactly where it had been. I had organized my grief beautifully into drawings and poems, yet I was doing this alone.
Therapy is good for the mind, and I'd encourage it alongside anything in this book. But grief speaks a different language, it speaks through: scent, song, season, movement. A quiet office asks you to stay composed, staying in only the language of the mind.
Grief groups have what a journal lacks, which is other people. Yet, watch what happens to a woman who has held everyone's hard days for decades. She gets about seven minutes. She listens beautifully, worries about whoever hasn't spoken, keeps her own share tidy and apologizes if she runs over. She leaves having held six people's grief and set down very little of her own.
The pattern is structural. Each of these keeps grief in the head, or asks you to manage yourself while you're in it. None of them gives your body a way to let go in a safe, natural space, with a grief tending facilitator guiding you.
The rooftop at Brit's Pub in downtown Minneapolis was packed with people watching the World Cup. I was wedged onto the lawn next to some young family friends, college kids shining brightly in everything they do. They smiled and asked how my 13-year-old son was doing.
They were picturing the boy they knew from five to eleven, the one who was ready to play all day. I was in a very difficult phase with him, watching his spark dim. I started crying, and it wasn't the kind of crying that stops because people are nearby. I could not stop crying.
They hugged me and said we'd talk later. I didn't say more than it's been really tough. It wasn't their role to receive an auntie's grief in the middle of a soccer game.
I see now that those tears were not a failure. They'd been collecting behind my eyes for weeks because I hadn't tended to the grief the tears were streaming from.
That pattern was old. For twenty-two years I carried grief about about a health condition I'd learned to manage carefully and gotten very good at not mentioning. I wrote about it in a private journal and told almost no one. Next to what people I love have survived, it felt too small to share.
Finally, I went for a walk in the woods with a good friend and shared the whole story out loud. Something that felt immense and stuck inside shrank to a manageable size once I spoke it out into the world. It felt amazing. I could finally ask for help, which I hadn't managed in two decades.
Grief needs a witness, and it needs a regular place to go. Without both, it will roar out of you in the wrong moment.
When grief has a set time and place, it stops hunting for openings in the rest of your life.
Five simple steps for one dedicated morning a month, so grief leaves through the body with a friend keeping you safe.
Helen Blodgett guides women through simple, embodied grief rituals in nature, in the Twin Cities and online. Her work, Mourning Together, gives women a regular place to tend the grief that builds up as we live and love.
She draws on Martín Prechtel's water's edge grief ritual and fifteen years of Afro Brazilian dance. She believes every loss deserves a witness, including the ones that seem too small or too distant to mention.
You'll discover a simple monthly ritual by the water, with a friend beside you, so your grief finally has its own place to go.