The Ocean is Still the Ocean

Every human being who loves someone or something will eventually encounter loss. Yet we tend to approach grief as though it is an interruption to life– something we move through so that we can eventually return to who we were before. But profound loss doesn’t really allow us to return. Grief isn’t necessarily about repairing ourselves after something has broken. Sometimes the person we were before the loss simply cannot contain what we now know. There are experiences that require us to shed the skin of who we were because that version of us had never needed to know how to live in this particular world. This new skin is still your own, but it is somehow different – renewed, more resilient, capable of holding a life the old skin had never known. But there is a process of growing new skin. It doesn't happen overnight. It took a lot of energy for your body to shed the old skin, and it will take an immense amount to grow this new skin as well. When grief is continually pushed down or avoided, the process can become more difficult—like something within us is trying to complete a natural cycle we haven't yet been able to allow. I have a bearded dragon, and I watch him shed his skin every few months. If he does not take in enough water, nourishment, and warmth during this period, his skin will not shed as quickly or as easily. Sometimes it dangles from his body in certain places and though I’d love to help him by pulling it off for him, I know it is part of his body’s natural process so I cannot force it. Eventually that skin falls off and he is renewed with that under-layer that is fresh and beautiful. It's almost like the process of birth. Grief may require something similar from us. Grief isn’t a destination or pathology. It is a natural process of transformation that requires conditions in which it can move.  

Grief asks to move, not disappear. I experience grief as waves. I can sometimes sense one forming before it reaches me, moving toward the shore of my heart and needing somewhere to rest and collapse in order to keep the ocean flowing. If I allow it to come ashore—to cry, breathe, remember, move, write, sit, talk, create—it eventually recedes. The waves continue to come. That doesn't mean the previous one wasn't “processed correctly.”  

The ocean is still the ocean.  

I don't think grief is something we finish. I don't think we graduate from loving someone simply because their physical presence is gone. I know that if I am in resistance to the waves, and if I don’t create space for the grief, I begin to notice constriction: shallower breathing, tension, anxiety, less spaciousness, less openness. Grief speaks through my body when I am not listening. Emotional energy asks for somewhere to go. Grief is no different.  

What we don’t allow ourselves to feel doesn’t simply disappear. Grief that hasn't been given space may appear as irritability, withdrawal, exhaustion, anxiety, numbness, restlessness, or difficulty connecting to the people around us. We may feel less patient with a partner, more sensitive to disappointment, less interested in intimacy, or simply unable to access parts of ourselves that once felt readily available. Grief does not necessarily announce itself as grief. This isn’t because the grieving person is doing something wrong. It’s because enormous amounts of energy can be required to hold something down. It’s like trying to hold a balloon under water. The difficulty is that when we don't recognize grief as the source of that constriction, we naturally begin looking for an explanation. We may assume something is wrong with the relationship. We may become frustrated with a partner for not understanding what we need when we don't fully understand it ourselves. Or we may turn the blame inward and wonder why we can't seem to feel better, connect more deeply, or return to who we were before. This is where awareness enters the equation to provide a bridge into a deeper level of understanding. Instead of immediately asking, What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with them? What’s wrong with this relationship? Perhaps we become curious about something underneath all of it:  

What within me hasn’t had somewhere to go?  

Sometimes what looks like disconnection from another person is actually disconnection from something within ourselves that has become too painful to touch. We can try harder to communicate. We can analyze the relationship, change behaviors, or search for solutions.  Human beings naturally make meaning of what they’re experiencing, but if grief is quietly organizing our inner world, relational strategies alone may never reach the source of what is asking for our attention. A partner may experience someone as withdrawn and interpret it as rejection. The grieving person may experience the partner's requests for connection as pressure. One moves closer. The other needs more space. The first feels increasingly abandoned. The second feels increasingly overwhelmed. Suddenly they're arguing about the relationship when grief is sitting quietly underneath the entire pattern. The pattern is the problem– but sometimes grief is the unseen energy feeding the pattern.  

The story around grief can create another layer of suffering. There is grief itself. And then there is everything we tell ourselves about grief. I’ve said or thought things, and heard others share some stories around their grief such as: I shouldn’t still feel this. I should be stronger. I need to move on. Am I moving on too soon? Why am I okay today when I was devastated yesterday? If I let myself feel this, I’ll never stop. My life wasn’t supposed to happen this way.  

We can suffer not only because we are grieving, but because we are judging the way we are grieving. 

There is no universal timeline for how long grief should remain close to the surface. Some days it may feel distant. On another day, a song, a scent, an anniversary, or an ordinary memory can bring someone immediately back into the room. The mind may interpret this return as regression. But perhaps grief isn't asking us to measure our progress. Perhaps it is simply asking to be met wherever it appears. 

What happens if grief doesn’t simply require interpretation? What if sometimes we simply feel, hold, notice, breathe, and allow? Moving toward acceptance doesn’t mean I wanted what happened. It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t change it if I could. Acceptance means I stop spending all of my energy asking this moment to become a different one. It means I stop resisting and just feel what’s here to be experienced. I can’t change what happened. But when I stop asking reality to be different, the energy once devoted to resisting it becomes available for living within it. 

Grief expands our capacity to hold contradiction. I fully feel the emotional and somatic experience of loss in order to speak the language of my heart. This is how emotional energy speaks to us. It wants to move through us to completion to allow full embodiment because we are in human bodies and that is what we're here for– to fully feel. Sensations are beautiful gifts. I do not want to become numb to any of them because numbness doesn’t selectively eliminate grief. To remain available to profound joy, wonder, intimacy, gratitude, beauty, and love means remaining available to the vulnerability of being human. I have known immense grief and yet I still choose aliveness. Not despite having experienced grief. And not because tragedy was somehow necessary or spiritually assigned to me. But because once it arrived, I decided to remain open to life. I can hold:  

Grief and gratitude.  

Loss and love.  

Death and life.  

Sorrow and beauty.  

Absence and continued connection.  

Death transforms us all, but I don't look at death as the end. I don't avoid transitions, transformations, or change. I know that transformation means growth and evolution. I have found that allowing myself to move with these cycles of loss and transformation has given me a kind of wisdom I could not have reached intellectually. I let go. I flow with it. After my fourteen-year-old yorkie, Bella died, I planted lilies over her grave. I planted something living to remember her beautiful life. Each spring, I watched life emerge from the place where I had buried something I loved. Just because someone I love is no longer here on earth with me in form, does not mean I need to give up living a full life and let my heart die with them.  

Grief has the power to change how we love and relate to the living. It has changed how I listen. It has changed my awareness of mortality. It has changed what I value. It has increased my capacity to sit with another person's suffering without immediately trying to fix it. Loss can strip away enormous amounts of noise. It can clarify what truly matters and what doesn't anymore. We may find ourselves saying what we want to say while people are still here. We may become less interested in spending our lives fighting about things that no longer seem important. Death can clarify life without needing to romanticize death. Tending to my own grief affects my relationship with myself and this naturally echoes through my external world as well. When I’m constricted and avoiding myself, there is less of me available relationally. When I’ve created space for my own emotional experience, I have greater capacity to make space for someone else's. I listen deeply to my own heart and it gives me the gift of listening deeply to the hearts of others. 

The way we hold our own pain influences the way we are able to hold another person's. 

I haven’t “overcome” my grief or “completed” my losses. They are part of me. We don’t “heal” from being human. And life will inevitably bring more change, endings, deaths, separations, beginnings, and transformations. The capacity I’m cultivating is therefore not completion. It is presence. I am not interested in becoming so healed that life can no longer break my heart. I want a heart capable of breaking open and remaining open. Perhaps emotional maturity isn't our ability to transcend pain. Perhaps it is our growing capacity to remain present for a life that contains everything. Life after loss is not life before loss. We don’t return to the old skin. We inhabit a new one. And perhaps resilience isn't the development of a thicker skin after all. Perhaps it is discovering that we can remain tender and still survive being changed. 

Grief is intensely personal, yet universally human. Maybe grief was never a path we were meant to complete. Maybe it is one of the many landscapes we learn to walk as human beings. There will be places where we know the terrain and places where we lose our way entirely. Sometimes someone farther along will offer us a map. Sometimes we will sit beside another person who cannot yet see the path ahead. We don't need to have overcome our losses to do this. We only need to have learned something from walking with them. Grief can initially feel profoundly isolating because my grief is uniquely mine. No one had precisely my relationship with the person I lost. No one carries exactly my memories, regrets, love, unfinished conversations, or bodily experience of their absence. 

And yet grief is also one of the most universally human experiences imaginable. 

Both things are true. 

No one can walk my exact path. 
And I am not walking alone. 

We encounter people farther down roads we've only just entered. They cannot tell us exactly where ours will lead, but they can leave markers along the way:  

I survived this part. 

You don't need to rush. 

There will be places to rest. 

You will laugh again, and you don't need to feel guilty when you do. 

I still need that reminder sometimes. 

Eventually, without necessarily realizing it, we become one of the people leaving markers for someone else. 

Perhaps the invitation of grief is not to return to who we were before loss found us. Perhaps it is to remain open enough to discover who we are becoming because we have loved deeply enough to grieve. 

And perhaps, somewhere along the way, we realize that the heart did not need to become harder in order to survive. 

It needed to become spacious enough to hold both the grief of what is gone and the beauty of what is still here.