The Magic in Loss

On the unexpected aliveness inside loss

Catherine is tired when she sits down. She lost her daughter seven years ago, her husband two years ago, and her cat this past spring. It was the cat that finally cracked her open. She hadn’t cried for any of it until then, and that’s when she found her way into my office.

We meet weekly and sit together in whatever comes up. Sadness, fatigue, sometimes silence. What I didn’t expect was what else shows up. Stories. A brightness in her eyes when she talks about the people she’s lost.

Something that feels, honestly, a little like joy.

I wrote last year about losing my own therapist suddenly - you can read about that here. Grief hit me in ways I wasn’t prepared for. And one of those ways was this: I had assumed, before I started working with people in real loss, that this would just be heavy. Depressing and hard to sit in week after week.

I was wrong about that.

Catherine becomes animated when she tells me about her daughter. Her breath opens up. There’s love in these stories, and sometimes a quiet desperation about how to keep going without these people. Both things at once, in the same body, in the same hour.

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Working from an Internal Family Systems framework, I invite her to notice where grief lives on any given day. Sometimes it’s a heaviness in her chest. Sometimes it rises and falls with her breath as a memory comes through. We follow it. Most importantly, we don’t try to resolve it.

What are the ways you remember someone? What happens in your body when you let yourself go there?

Catherine makes me wonder. Maybe grief is less about loss and more about a long, drawn out conversation with love.

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Where does grief live in your body? And what do you find when you stay with it?

Warmly,
Anna