Why I Write About Grief

Before going further, I want to provide some context for where these thoughts come from.

I am not a grief counselor, psychologist, or expert on loss. What follows comes primarily from my own experiences, reflections, and the perspectives that have helped me understand some of the losses in my life.

My second-youngest son, Shea, died by suicide.

Few experiences can prepare a parent for the death of a child—and perhaps even fewer for the complicated questions that can accompany suicide. Along with the enormous sorrow of losing Shea, I had to live with questions about his death that I could neither answer nor change.

There was no going backward and changing what happened.

There was only learning how to live forward.

Much of what I write about surrender, acceptance, gratitude, and allowing grief to move through us rather than continually fighting against it grew from that experience.

But I have also experienced another kind of loss.

My marriage ended in divorce when I did not want it to end. For years afterward, part of me continued hoping that somehow we might reconcile and restore what had been lost.

No one had died.

Yet something had.

The “we” we had created had died.

The people were still alive, but the life we had shared was gone.

Eventually, I had to confront something that happens when deeply intertwined relationships end: we don’t only lose another person or the life we shared with them.

We can also lose part of the identity we created together.

Over the years, I and you gradually become we.

Our plans become our plans. Our home becomes our home. Our memories become our memories. Even our ideas about the future quietly assume the presence of another person.

When that relationship ends—whether through death or separation—the person who remains is left with a surprisingly difficult question:

Who am I now that “we” is gone?

We have to begin finding our way from we back to me.

Divorce and death are obviously not the same. I would never pretend that my divorce allows me to fully understand what it is like to lose a spouse to death. But both experiences taught me something about attachment, identity, longing, and the tremendous difficulty the mind has accepting a reality it did not choose.

With Shea, I could not bring my son back.

With my marriage, I could not recreate a relationship that no longer existed.

In both cases, my mind could revisit the past endlessly. It could bargain with it, question it, romanticize it, become angry with it, and desperately wish it had unfolded differently.

But it could not change it.

Eventually, I began discovering that there is a difference between remembering the past and trying to live there.

That distinction changed something in me.

Acceptance did not mean forgetting Shea.

It did not mean that my marriage hadn’t mattered.

It did not mean that I stopped loving what had been.

Acceptance meant becoming willing to stop arguing with what was.

As the struggle against reality softened, something else gradually began taking its place.

Gratitude.

Gratitude did not replace grief. It learned to exist beside it.

Instead of seeing only what I had lost, I became increasingly able to recognize what I had been given.

Shea had lived.

I had known him.

I had loved him.

My marriage had existed.

We had shared years, experiences, struggles, laughter, disappointments, growth, and a life together.

None of that disappeared simply because it ended.

Perhaps this is one of the paradoxes of grief:

Something can be over without becoming meaningless.

And someone can be gone without everything they gave us being gone with them.

That is the perspective from which the next two writings emerged.

From “We” to “Me”

The first, When “We” Becomes “Me,” explores something I hadn’t fully understood until I experienced it myself.

When we lose someone with whom our identity has become deeply intertwined, we aren’t only grieving their absence. We may also be grieving the disappearance of us—the routines, conversations, expectations, roles, plans, and countless little assumptions that made up we.

Finding me again doesn’t require erasing we. Perhaps it means discovering how everything that relationship gave us can become integrated into the person who remains.

And Then, Moving Forward

The second, When “Me” Begins to Move Forward, asks the question that eventually follows:

What do I do with the life that is still here?

Moving forward can initially feel like betrayal.

If I laugh again, am I forgetting?

If I find happiness, am I leaving someone behind?

If I build a new life, does that diminish the life we shared?

I’ve gradually come to believe the answer is no.

Moving forward does not require moving away from love. It means allowing what was to remain meaningful without requiring it to still be happening.

The past can remain part of us while we reopen ourselves to the present. Grief and gratitude do not have to be enemies. Sometimes they are different expressions of the same love.

These next two writings explore the journey from we to me, from resistance toward acceptance, and from looking backward toward slowly reopening our eyes to the life still ahead.

We don’t have to leave love behind in order to move forward.

Perhaps we learn to carry it with us.

Continue to Part One: When “We” Becomes “Me”