So, let me have a go.

There is something I want to say this week, and it is not about death exactly. It is about all the things we are mourning that we have not been given permission to mourn.

I think a great many of us are walking around heavier than we can explain. I see it in my clients. Often I feel it in my own body. If we truly attune to others, we can sense it in them too. We turn up to work. We answer the messages. We make the dinner. And underneath there is a low, steady weight that has no name and no funeral. We try to talk about it sometimes and the words come out wrong, or too small, or sound like complaining, so we stop. We tell ourselves other people have it worse. We tell ourselves we should be over it by now. Over what, we could not quite say.

I want to give voice to some of these griefs, because I think part of what is making this time so hard is that we are mourning in private things we do not yet have a public language for.

There is the grief of the world that was. Not the world of any particular year, but the felt sense that things were once more reliable than they are now. That summers behaved like summers. That the news could be read without bracing. That the future, whatever it held, was at least going to arrive in a shape we recognised. Many of us are quietly grieving a stability we were promised and are no longer being given, and we feel foolish saying so, because the loss is too large and too diffuse to point at.

There is the grief of capacities. The friend who used to bounce back from a hard week and now needs three. The body that used to do the thing without negotiation and now requires bargaining. The mind that used to hold the whole list and now drops things. We are aging, or recovering, or simply running on different reserves than we once did, and there is a particular sorrow in noticing that the version of yourself you assumed would always be available has quietly left the building.

There is the grief of relationships that did not die but changed. The friend who survived something and came back different. The parent who is still here but no longer quite reachable. The partner with whom you are still in love and also in mourning, because the shared life you once had has been replaced by a shared life you did not choose. No one died. And yet something did, and you are not allowed to say so without sounding ungrateful for what remains.

There is the grief of futures that will not happen. The child not had. The career not taken. The country not returned to. The version of your life that was once entirely plausible and is now, suddenly and without ceremony, no longer on offer. These futures had real weight. They were not fantasies. They were possibilities you were quietly building toward, and their disappearance is a death in every meaningful sense, even though no one has died.

There is the grief of what we are watching happen to the more than human world. The species that did not return this spring. The familiar tree that came down. The river that no longer sounds the way it sounded when you were a child. Most of us have learned not to speak about this, because there is nowhere for the conversation to go. But the body knows. The body is keeping count.

And there is the grief of the selves we have been, who do not survive the things that happen to us. Illness does this. Caregiving does this. Loss does this. The slow accumulation of years does this. We come out the other side of something and we are not who we were before, and the person we were before deserves to be mourned, and almost never is.

I think if we could give each other permission to name these griefs, something in us would soften. Not because the griefs would go away. They will not. But because so much of the exhaustion of this time is the exhaustion of carrying losses we are not allowed to call losses. The body cannot rest from a grief it has not been given leave to feel.

So here is what I want to offer this week, in the spirit of Let’s talk about Death and Dying. Let us also talk about the dyings that do not announce themselves. If you are tired in a way that sleep is not fixing. If you are sad in a way that you cannot quite locate. If you are moving through your days carrying something that has no name and no casserole and no card in the post, you are not imagining it. You are grieving. You are grieving things you have not been given permission to grieve, and the lack of permission is itself part of the weight.

You are allowed to mourn what you have lost, even if no one died. You are allowed to mourn the world, the future, the friend who came back changed, the self who did not come back at all.

The first kindness, in a time like this one, may simply be to let the grief be real.

with love, Richard x

I could not write any of this without those who have spent their lives making space for grief in a culture that would rather hurry past it. The poets, the hospice workers, the therapists, the mourners who keep showing up to one another’s losses, the teachers who insist that grief is not a problem but a form of love. In particular I want to thank Francis Weller, whose work on the gates of grief gave me language for things I had been carrying without name. I had the privilege of training with him last year, and the experience continues to shape how I sit with my own grief and how I hold space for the grief of others. The idea that some of these sorrows are not personal failings but ancient human inheritances, and that we are meant to grieve them in the company of others, has changed how I move through my own life.

And I want to acknowledge those who came before me. My ancestors, who carried grief in the best ways they knew how, often without the language or the rituals or the company that grief requires. Some of what they could not metabolise has come down to me, and I do not say this as a complaint. I say it as an inheritance I am trying to be worthy of. The grief I carry for them, and the grief I carry that is theirs still travelling through me, I hope I do the best I can to meet. To feel. To transmute. To not pass on unchanged. This too is part of the work of a life, and I am still learning how to do it.

This piece stands on their shoulders, and on the shoulders of many others who have done the long, quiet work of teaching us how best to feel what we feel.

#DyingMattersWeek #grief #Loss #death