Take time to grieve in a way that feels right to you. In the middle of deepest, earliest grief, sometimes you will be joyous, and sometimes you will not be thinking about the one whom you have lost. It ebbs and flows, loses some of its power over time, but never disappears entirely. No matter what, honor your memories and your inclinations.

I am all talk right now. Life can’t go on. That’s just a thing people say to other people because they heard it on daytime TV. It doesn’t exist for me. It never will. There will be no moving on. But people not living in the valley of a tragedy don’t like to hear this. They like to hear you “buck up.” They want to say to your friends, to your

We are conditioned to see death and painful longing as problems to be solved rather than as sacred landscapes to be revered. We are encouraged to medicate our grief, to treat loss as a malfunction that needs troubleshooting, to satisfy our longing as swiftly as possible. We may feel obliged to employ any of dozens of spiritual methods, from