Grief work is slow work
I’ve often wondered - and often do, still - how we can carve out space to grieve in this fast paced, solution-oriented world. After spending over a decade with grief, I can’t help but feel that grief defies the rapid rhythms of modern society. Grief is not something we fix, or are at some point done with. It’s not something we can work our way past with a positive mindset and can-do attitude. If anything, grief requires us to pause, to create space to be present with our inner world. This, in itself, feels like a radical act—an act of reclaiming our humanity from a culture that often prizes moving on over sitting with sorrow.
I remember calling a coaching/therapist friend sometime in the months before my father’s death and voicing my struggle with the liminal space I felt I was living in. Like I had one foot in the world that kept turning and churning, and another in this bubble of peace and slow quiet. Part of me wanted to go and do and live, maybe even to just be done with it, with this achingly slow process of losing him. Yet another part of me wanted to sit at that dining room table with him for hours and days and years more, simply basking in each other’s presence. I clearly remember my friend offering to help me resolve and let go of that inner tug of war, and just feeling so.. confused. For this was my grief. Grief for the life I was only half living right now, grief for my father not being part of that half the way he had been for 32 years, grief for not being able to spend every minute of every day with him, grief for what was to come. What was there to be resolved? Resolution would come sooner rather than later when my father’s body and mind would finally give up and leave me with two feet in one irreparably altered world again.
I think this exchange has become stereotypical for so many of my interactions around grief. This tendency to see turmoil and jump to solutions. To hear sorrow and want to coddle it until there is no longer room for tears to slip through. We’re not used to the slow unraveling that is grief. Conditioned to seek quick fixes, grief confounds us. Resisting all attempts at hastening, it demands that we surrender to its timeline, that we honour the depth of our emotions without rushing to tidy them away.
Grief work, then, demands patience. And as an impatient person in an even more impatient society, that’s something I’ve had to learn. There was a time I would test if I was over it yet - for that’s what I’d been told was now my task. Get over it. Move on. Leave it in the past. But grief is not a linear journey with a clear beginning, middle, and end. It’s a tangled web of emotions and a lifelong pilgrimage through uncharted land. Grief asks us to come to terms with uncertainty. To sit in the discomfort of not having all the answers, of not knowing when the pain will subside or when memories will bring more solace than sorrow. Don’t underestimate the extent to which this process is countercultural in a society that values certainty and control. Especially during those first, raw months of grief, when every part of us feels tender and exposed, it challenges us to embrace vulnerability, to acknowledge our wounds openly, and to find strength in our willingness to face them head-on.
Part of grief work is a deconditioning from societal expectations.
It asks us to unlearn the messages that suggest grief should be swift, that mourning should be confined to a few days or weeks, that there is a roadmap and a timespan and a set way we should ago about this journey. It asks us to develop tremendous amounts of self-compassion. And it demands a redefinition of strength — not as stoic endurance (oh, had I become good at enduring) but as the courage to be present with our pain, to open up to it and to lean into our emotions.
Ultimately, embracing grief work as slow work is an act of reclaiming our humanity. It is accepting that we will not always be okay - and that that’s okay. That is being human. It is recognising that some things will leave us irrevocably altered, and that that’s not always a beautiful thing. I have found grief to be the most humbling teacher, reminding me that no amount of inner or outer work will make us immune to the heartbreaking power of love and loss.
