The Stone You Carry: Honoring Grief

This may be my most candid post yet.

And it should be. Grief is one of the most deeply human experiences we face, and yet it’s often the hardest to talk about. It’s vast and consuming, a weight we carry through our days, reshaping how we see the world and ourselves. Grief doesn’t follow rules or timelines, and it rarely aligns with what society expects of us.

I want to acknowledge that this post may not resonate with everyone. Grief is such a personal and unique experience, and no single perspective can fully capture its complexity. What I’ve shared here is just that—one perspective. It’s a collection of thoughts, reflections, and suggestions drawn from my work, my lived experiences with grief, my professional training in grief counseling, and, ultimately, my own feelings and observations. This post is not meant to be a guide or a definitive answer to grief; it’s simply an offering. My hope is that, for someone out there, these words might provide a moment of comfort, a sense of validation, or a way to give language to the weight they are carrying.

We need to talk about grief, not because there are answers to find, but because it asks something of us: to feel it, to honor it, to let it shape us.

Here’s the thing about grief: it’s not tidy. It doesn’t fit neatly into our lives or nicely on the calendar. It refuses to be contained by the timelines we impose or the expectations we cling to. And while grief is deeply personal, it often feels like the world expects us to grieve in a way that’s predictable, linear, or even palatable.

I personally don’t believe in clichés or platitudes—they’re too easy, they feel dismissive. I think grief deserves more than that. It’s messy and raw and profoundly universal, and we do it a disservice when we try to smooth over its edges with words like, “You’re so strong” or “Time heals all wounds.” But again, I understand that these words bring people immense comfort, and this post is not about the right or wrong way to find comfort in grief.

This post is also not about answers or quick fixes. It’s about opening the door to a deeper conversation about grief—what it is, how it moves through us, and how we can better support each other through its unpredictable waves. It’s a first step, an offering of words, and a reminder that while grief is one of the heaviest things we carry, it is also a reflection of love.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Grief

Grief doesn’t arrive gently. It crashes into you, dismantling the life you knew. It doesn’t follow a schedule, and it refuses to stay quiet. It’s unpredictable and untamed, appearing at the most inconvenient moments: in the middle of a work meeting, at the grocery store, or late at night when you’re finally alone with your thoughts.

Grief reminds us of things we don’t want to face. It reminds us that life is fragile, that nothing is permanent, and that loss is as inevitable as love. It forces us to confront the impermanence of being human, the fragility of life, the inevitability of loss, and the vulnerability of love.

We live in a culture that struggles with grief. We want it to be smaller, quieter, easier to understand. We say things like, “Everything happens for a reason” or “Time heals all wounds,” hoping to soothe someone's pain. But these words often feel hollow, as if they’re trying to contain something too vast to hold. They suggest that grief can be reasoned with, explained, or even fixed, when in reality, grief demands to simply be.

And when we’re not minimizing grief, we’re rushing it. There’s an unspoken expectation that after a certain amount of time—weeks, months, or maybe a year—the person grieving should be “better.” We treat grief as though it’s a season you eventually move out of, rather than something that becomes a part of you.

But here’s the truth: Grief is not something that ends. It doesn’t have a finish line or a neat resolution. It changes shape, it softens in some ways, but it doesn’t disappear. It becomes a part of the landscape of your life, weaving itself into who you are. And that’s okay.

Megan Devine, a grief advocate and psychotherapist, often says, “Some things can’t be fixed. They can only be carried.” And that’s the heart of it. Grief asks us to carry its weight, not to lighten it or set it down. It asks us to sit in the discomfort, both our own and that of others. What makes grief so hard for those outside of it is that it’s not something you can fix or solve. It’s not a problem to be managed; it’s an experience to be carried. And that’s hard for us as a culture, because we like solutions. We like certainty. We like things that make sense.

And grief doesn't give us any of those things.

That’s why we avoid it. We don’t mean to, but we do. We sidestep hard conversations, or we try to wrap them in positivity. We tell the grieving person they’re “so strong,” which, while well-meaning, often translates to: “Please don’t fall apart in front of me.” We don’t do this because we don’t care. We do it because we don’t know how to hold space for someone’s pain without being overwhelmed by our own discomfort.

Grief asks us to sit with pain without trying to fix it. It asks us to be present in a way that is deeply vulnerable and uncomfortable. And that’s the truth we don’t talk about: We avoid grief not because we lack empathy, but because it forces us to confront our own fragility, our own fears, and our own eventual losses. Grief may be uncomfortable, but it’s also sacred. And the more we allow ourselves to lean into its discomfort, the more we can honor the love that made it possible.

Grief Is Transformation

Dr. Mary Frances O’Connor was featured on an episode of the podcast Being Well and she spoke about her work on grief. She asks, “When did you get over your wedding day?” It’s a question meant to challenge the idea that grief is something you “get over.” Instead, she frames it as a new experience you enter—a transformation, much like becoming someone’s partner or becoming a parent.

Think about it: When you graduate, when become someone’s partner or a parent, your life changes in profound ways. You step through a door into a new chapter of life, and you never go back to who you were before. It would be absurd to say you should “get over” such a fundamental change. Grief is no different.

When we lose someone we love, we don’t “get over” that loss. We enter a new chapter of life—one shaped by their absence. We become different people, forever marked by the love we shared and the void it left behind. There are no bookends for grief. The experience does not end at the funeral, similarly to becoming someone’s partner does not end at the wedding or becoming someone’s parent does not end at their birth. These experiences evolve over time, with every moment that passes. Grief is not something to conquer or leave behind; it’s a transformation, a part of who we are now.

This perspective is freeing in its honesty. It removes the pressure to move on or return to who you were before. It acknowledges that grief is not a detour—it’s part of a new path.

Another way to picture it: Grief is like a stone you put in your pocket the day the person you love dies. On that first day, the stone is heavy, noticeable, and inconvenient. It might even be sharp—when you put your hand in your pocket, it stings, and the pain catches you off guard. For a long time, you feel the stone constantly. It presses into you, reminding you of its presence in ways that are impossible to ignore. But over time, something changes. The more you reach into your pocket, the more you wrap your hand around the stone and feel its edges, the less sharp they seem. Your hand learns to move around it. Your palm forms calluses over time, protecting you from the sharper edges. Your muscles learn to carry the extra weight of the stone. Your pocket starts to make more room for the stone. Your body adapts to the stone.

The stone never goes away. It’s always there, nestled in the fabric of your life. But you’ve grown around it. You’ve learned to carry it. And in doing so, it has become a part of who you are.

Grief’s Unique Footprint

Grief doesn’t follow rules. It doesn’t adhere to expectations or align with how the world thinks it should look. It doesn’t matter what relationship title the person held in your life—a parent, a sibling, a partner, a friend—grief isn’t about roles. It’s about the unique connection you shared, the memories you built, and the space they occupied in your world.

Grief is personal. It’s like a map of the ways someone’s presence shaped your life and the void their absence leaves behind. Two siblings can lose the same parent and grieve entirely differently. A best friend might feel a sharper, more immediate pain than a distant family member. It’s not the role someone played that determines the depth of the grief—it’s the impact they had.

This is where we often get it wrong. We expect grief to fit into neat boxes, to look a certain way depending on who was lost. But grief doesn’t care about labels or societal expectations. It reflects love, not titles.

Sometimes, grief surprises you. It might come as a sudden laugh in the middle of remembering something funny they used to say. It might show up in a song you didn’t know you still remembered the words to or in the scent of their favorite perfume wafting through a store. Grief can bring joy and connection just as much as it brings sorrow.

There’s no one way to grieve, no right way to feel the absence of someone you love. And yet, so often, we try to measure it. We compare it. We judge it.

“She doesn’t seem sad enough.”

“Why isn’t he over it yet?”

“I don’t know why this is still so hard for me.”

These thoughts, whether from others or ourselves, miss the point. Grief is not linear or predictable. It’s not a task to check off or a journey with a clear destination. It’s a process of learning to live in the world again—this world, the one that now exists without them.

Grief leaves its mark in subtle and profound ways. It can reshape how you see the world, how you connect with others, and even how you see yourself. It asks you to carry both love and loss in the same breath, to hold space for absence while still finding ways to move forward.

And here’s what I know: however grief shows up for you, it’s valid. It doesn’t need to look like anyone else’s. It doesn’t need to make sense to anyone else. Grief is yours—yours to feel, yours to carry, yours to make sense of in your own time.

The Problem with the Stages of Grief

The stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—are so ingrained in our cultural understanding of loss that they’ve become almost synonymous with the grieving process. But their origins tell a different story. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross developed these stages to describe how individuals with terminal illnesses come to terms with their own mortality. Over time, they were adapted to apply to grief after losing a loved one, but this shift has created more confusion than clarity.

While the stages may offer some people a framework to make sense of their emotions, they can also impose a false sense of order on something that is inherently chaotic and personal. Even though it’s often said you can move through the stages in any order—or revisit them multiple times—the very idea of “stages” suggests a progression, a roadmap, or even a finish line. And that’s simply not how grief works.

Grief doesn’t unfold in steps. It’s unpredictable. You might feel anger and acceptance in the same day. You might go months without crying, only to find yourself overwhelmed by sorrow years later. You might never feel some of these so-called stages at all, and that’s okay.

The problem with the stages of grief is that they can unintentionally set people up to feel like they’re “doing it wrong.” If you’re not angry, are you grieving properly? If you haven’t reached acceptance, does that mean you’re stuck? Grief doesn’t fit into these boxes, and trying to force it there can leave people feeling inadequate or misunderstood.

It’s important to remember that the grieving process is as unique as the relationship you had with the person you lost. No one else can tell you how to grieve or where you should be on some imagined timeline. Grief isn’t a checklist or a test to pass—it’s an experience to live through, one moment at a time.

The Harm of Our Cultural Expectations

My candid opinion: our culture doesn’t know how to handle grief. We talk about it in hushed tones, offer hurried condolences, and then expect life to move on. We say things like, “Time heals all wounds,” or “They wouldn’t want you to be sad,” as if those words could make the loss hurt any less.

The truth is, these expectations don’t just fail to help—they often make things harder for those who are grieving.

There’s an unspoken timeline for grief in our culture. Maybe it’s a few months, maybe a year, but beyond that, people start to wonder why you’re not “better.” They might not say it outright, but it shows up in the way they stop asking how you’re doing or change the subject when you bring up the person you’ve lost. It shows up in the expectation that you should be “strong” or “moving on.”

But grief doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t respect timelines or social norms. It lingers, it ebbs and flows, and sometimes, it blindsides you all over again just when you thought you’d found steady ground.

The harm goes deeper than words, though. As a society, we prioritize productivity and normalcy over emotional healing. Grief is seen as something to “get through” rather than something to experience fully. People are often expected to return to work, to “get back to life,” to carry on as if their world hasn’t just been turned upside down.

And because our culture is uncomfortable with grief, we also avoid its rawness. Instead of sitting with someone’s pain, we try to redirect it. We offer advice or solutions:

• “Have you tried journaling?”

• “Maybe it’s time to focus on the good memories.”

• “You should get out more—it might help.”

While these suggestions are well-meaning, they often feel dismissive. They suggest that the person grieving should be doing more, trying harder, or finding ways to feel better. But grief isn’t something you fix. It’s something you feel. Our culture doesn’t teach us how to do that. It teaches us to avoid pain, to seek quick solutions, to look away from what feels too heavy. And in doing so, it leaves those who are grieving feeling unsupported and unseen. Quite simply, we leave them behind.

Grief is an incredibly isolating experience. Suddenly, you’re trying to adjust to this new version of yourself—a person forever changed—without the presence of the one you’ve lost. At the same time, the people around you start treating you with a certain level of fragility, as though your grief is something to tiptoe around. It’s as if they’re scared of your pain, unsure how to approach it, and in their effort to avoid “upsetting you” (a phrase that deserves its own exploration another day), they unintentionally create more distance.

You find yourself in this strange orbit of knowing that no one truly understands your experience. Life continues for everyone else—they go back to work, to their routines, to their usual conversations—while your life, forever altered, moves in a direction they can’t quite follow. And so, you become more isolated.

Here lies the problem: the most distressing and uncomfortable symptoms of grief—like the aching sense of loss, the unpredictable waves of emotion, and the feeling of being untethered—are all the more challenging to navigate without meaningful social support. The revisions to the DSM-5-TR added Prolonged Grief Disorder as a diagnosis, with criteria like “intense yearning or longing for the deceased person” or “marked sense of disbelief about the death.” But what strikes me most is what’s missing from this list: a lack of support for the grieving individual.

This diagnosis reveals a major issue: How can we claim to understand grief enough to diagnose it without acknowledging the profound impact of isolation and the absence of social support? Grief is not a disorder—it’s a natural response to love and loss. But without a community to witness and hold it, grief can become unbearable, not because of what it is, but because of how alone we are made to feel in it.

What would it look like if we did things differently? What if we stopped expecting people to “get over it” and instead gave them permission to grieve however they needed to? What if we showed up not with solutions but with presence? What if we learned to sit with someone’s pain without trying to fix it, trusting that our presence alone is enough?

Grief doesn’t ask for answers. It asks for space. It asks for patience. It asks for us to be there—not to take the pain away, but to hold it with them.

“We Shall Be Saved in an Ocean of Tears”

Gabor Maté, reflecting on grief, shared a beautiful message while discussing grief on Megan Devine's podcast "It's Ok That You're Not Ok": “We shall be saved in an ocean of tears.”

There’s something so peaceful about this idea—the notion that healing doesn’t come from suppressing our grief but from allowing it to flow freely, like waves in an endless sea. Too often, we treat tears as something to be wiped away, hidden, or held back. But tears are not a sign of weakness; they’re a release, a way for the body to process the depth of loss and the weight of love that has nowhere else to go.

Grief is not something we think our way through. It’s not solved by logic or intellectual acceptance. Healing comes when we feel our grief fully—when we let the tears come, when we sit with the ache, when we allow ourselves to break wide open and sit in the ocean of our tears.

Maté’s words remind us that crying isn’t just a reaction to grief; it’s part of the grieving process itself. It’s the body’s way of expressing what words cannot. In a world that often urges us to hold it together, to “stay strong,” tears are an act of rebellion. They say, This is hard. This hurts. This matters.

Imagine standing in that ocean of tears. At first, it might feel overwhelming, like the waves will pull you under. The grief feels unending, the sorrow too great to bear. But over time, something shifts. You learn to float. You realize that the tears aren’t drowning you—they’re carrying you. Each wave that washes over you is a step closer to healing, not because the pain disappears, but because you’ve allowed yourself to feel it.

This is where the paradox of grief lies: the more we fight it, the heavier it becomes. The more we allow ourselves to feel it, the more it softens. When we suppress grief, it doesn’t go away—it waits, lingering in the corners of our minds and hearts, finding other ways to surface. But when we let ourselves cry, when we allow the ocean to do its work, we give grief the space it needs to move through us.

In those moments of surrender, grief transforms. The tears don’t erase the loss or make it hurt any less, but they create a space for healing to begin. They remind us that our pain is a testament to our love, and that love, even in the face of loss, is worth every tear we shed.

So, let the tears come. Let the ocean carry you. Grieve not because you’re weak, but because you loved.

Final Thoughts on Grief

Grief is a quiet reminder of the love we shared and the absence we now carry. It’s not something to fix or move past. It’s something we learn to live with, something that becomes a part of us.

Grief doesn’t ask for answers. It doesn’t ask for timelines. It doesn’t demand that you be strong or put on a brave face. It simply asks to be felt. And that can be one of the hardest things to do—because grief is heavy, messy, and relentless.

If you’re grieving, know this: There’s no right way to do it. It doesn’t matter if your grief feels raw and overwhelming or quiet and distant. It doesn’t matter if it shows up in tears every day or catches you off guard years later. However grief is showing up for you, it’s valid.

Let yourself cry. Let yourself feel the weight of the stone in your pocket, knowing it might always be there. Over time, the edges may soften, and your hand might learn how to hold it differently, but it will still be part of your life. And that’s okay.

You don’t have to rush. You don’t have to make your grief smaller for the sake of others. Grief isn’t something to conquer—it’s something to carry.

And if it feels unbearable, remember this: You’re not alone in the weight of it. There’s no map for this, but there are others walking their own path through the same storm. Grief is deeply personal, but it’s also universal. It’s a reflection of what it means to love and lose, and in that, there’s a connection that quietly holds us all.