We are told that grief is something to move through, as if it were a tunnel with an exit we can see from the entrance. We speak of “stages” as though loss follows a predictable itinerary, a journey we can map and measure and eventually complete. But anyone who has stood in the wreckage of real loss knows the truth: grief is not a passage. It is a remaking.
What Grief Reveals
Viktor Frankl, who lost nearly everything in the concentration camps—his wife, his parents, his manuscript, his world—understood something essential about suffering that our culture consistently forgets. He observed that meaning cannot be given to you; it can only be discovered through your unique response to life’s demands. Grief is one of those demands. Perhaps the most profound one. And how we respond to it becomes part of who we are.
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The temptation is to treat grief as a problem to be solved, an obstacle between who we were before and who we want to be after. But this framing misses what grief actually offers. Loss doesn’t interrupt our lives, it reveals what our lives were actually about all along. We grieve because we loved. The depth of our sorrow maps precisely onto the depth of our connection. To wish away the pain is to wish away what made us human in the first place.
Carl Jung wrote extensively about what he called the shadow—those aspects of ourselves we’d rather not see, the parts we’ve pushed into the darkness. Grief forces a confrontation with the ultimate shadow: the knowledge that everything we love will one day be taken from us, and that we too will be taken. Most of us spend our lives constructing elaborate architectures of distraction to avoid this truth. Then someone dies. And the architecture collapses. We are left standing in the rubble, forced to reckon with what remains.
But there is something beautiful in that collapse—the way it strips away everything that doesn’t matter and leaves only what does. The pretenses fall. The petty concerns evaporate. What remains is precisely what mattered.
Becoming Someone New
I think often about what it means to be transformed by loss rather than merely wounded by it. There is a crucial difference. To be wounded is to be diminished, to carry damage that impairs our capacity for life. To be transformed is to be changed into something new—different, yes, but not less. Perhaps even more. The question grief asks is not “how do I return to who I was?” but “who am I becoming now that I know what I know?”
The people we lose do not simply vanish. They become part of us in ways that were not possible while they were alive. Their voices merge with our own internal dialogue. Their values shape our decisions in moments they’ll never witness. Their love becomes something we carry rather than something we receive. This is not a consolation prize for death—it is the strange alchemy by which the dead continue to participate in the living. We become the ones who hold the light they left behind.
My father-in-law Albert passed away recently after a brief and tragic battle with pancreatic cancer. He was the kind of man who made everyone around him better without ever seeming to try. Patient where I am impatient. Gentle where I am intense. Willing to spend an entire afternoon on a project that didn’t need to be perfect, simply because the work itself—done together—was the point. Watching him die taught me something about watching someone live. He remained himself until the very end. That kind of consistency is rare. It is also, I’m learning, instructive.
For my wife Rachel, this loss is something else entirely. Albert wasn’t just her father—he was her closest friend, her steady force, the safest harbor she knew. There are roles in our lives that others try to fill but never quite can, and Albert occupied that space for her in a way that was singular and irreplaceable. Watching her navigate this grief is watching someone lose a piece of their foundation. The ground she walked on is different now. I can stand beside her, but I cannot stand where he stood. That place belongs to him alone.
The Lessons Grief Teaches
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There is a communal dimension to grief that our individualistic culture often neglects. We are not meant to carry this weight alone. The rituals of mourning that every culture has developed—the gatherings, the shared meals, the telling of stories—exist because grief is too large for any single person to hold. When we share our loss, we don’t diminish it. We distribute it. We allow others to carry a portion of what would otherwise crush us. And in doing so, we remember that we belong to each other, that our lives are woven together in ways that death cannot fully sever.
I am still learning what Albert’s death is teaching me. The lessons arrive slowly, often in unexpected moments—a tool I reach for that he gave me, a joke my son tells that sounds like something Albert would have said, the way my wife’s face looks just like her father’s when she’s lost in thought. Grief, it turns out, is patient. It doesn’t demand that we understand it all at once. It simply asks that we remain open to what it has to offer.
The greatest danger is not that we will feel too much, but that we will feel too little. That we will rush past the pain in our hurry to return to normal. But there is no normal anymore. There is only what comes next—a life that includes this loss, that is shaped by it, that carries forward what we’ve been given.
We grieve because we loved. And if we’re willing, grief can teach us to love even more deeply, even more consciously, even more urgently—while we still have the chance.
