Part III: Rendezvous With Grief

Hello, Grief: The First Meeting

Unexpectedly losing two loved ones within two months was a crash course in Grief. It collided with a belief I didn’t know I carried: that grief was rare.

I didn’t realize then, but Grief had been patiently waiting for an opening.

Anyway, there I was, surrounded and consumed. Not just by recent loss, but a lifetime of unprocessed moments. All the times I had stood Grief up.

We could call it miscommunication. Crossed wires. Or maybe I simply didn’t know I was supposed to meet it.

It really doesn’t matter.

What became clear was this: introductions were happening now.

Old Grief. New Grief. Grief appearing in places I didn’t expect.

It reminded me of confirmation bias. I remember being pregnant and suddenly noticing childrens parks everywhere, wondering when the city had built them all.

They had always been there. My mind had just filtered them out.

Not relevant. Not recognizable. Not something I had the tools to see.

Grief was the same.

It hadn’t been absent.

Just unseen & unmet. Yet.

~

In my twenties, I worked in a busy broker’s office alongside a row of other assistants. One day, I passed a coworker’s cubicle and saw her shoving random papers into an already stuffed bottom drawer.

“What’s that?”

I was genuinely curious. My own cubicle was meticulously organized. Order felt like safety.

“That’s where I put things I don’t wanna do.”

She said it casually. Like it was obvious. Like it was allowed. Like she had permission.

I remember standing there quietly stunned. You can just…decide not to deal with something? No stress about it? No panic?

What happens to it?

I think about that drawer almost weekly, but lately a lot more.

Because that’s what I’d been doing with Grief. Closing the drawer before I ever had to look inside. Telling myself I’d get to it later, or that maybe it didn’t matter enough to open at all.

But it was still there.

Waiting.

Grief isn’t just about losing someone, but everything I never made space to feel.

HELLO, GRIEF

I vividly remember our first meeting.

I was visiting my parents in BC, after Mom’s diagnosis.

A week earlier, I had been on a call with the specialist. I wrote down the long, foreign word he used: cholangiocarcinoma. After we hung up, I looked up the survival rate.

Less than 5%.

This was March.

I flew home soon after. I knew, somehow, this would be the last visit like this.

It was a beautiful weekend. We talked about spirituality and healing. We did EFT and Reiki for the pain.

And when she rested, I walked.

March in this part of BC is beautiful. Cherry blossoms are coming into bloom. The abundant green is a stark contrast to the wintery tundra I’d left behind in SK. Still frozen and buried under snow.

I noticed everything.

Owls. Rainbows. Feathers.

Signs everywhere.

This was the first time Grief showed herself to me.

Or maybe, the first time I’d recognized her.

She joined me on those walks.

Not loud. Not overwhelming.

She didn’t burst in.

She tiptoed.

Careful not to scare me away. (She was right; I was skittish.)

At first, she showed me small things through pictures in my mind.

The end of a good meal.

The last bite of dessert.

The quiet ache at the end of a good weekend.

That subtle pull I had when I left Hawaii, not knowing if I’ll ever return.

There was sadness, but it was also tinged with joy and satisfaction.

She showed me how endings carry both.

And slowly, as I softened, she went deeper.

Images came.

My son, outgrowing diapers.

Feeding himself.

Walking into school.

That moment I felt it… the strange mix of relief and ache. Freedom and loss inexplicably tied together.

Nothing was wrong.

Nothing was broken.

This was Grief, too.

She paused while I explored the sensations in my body. It felt like murky, thick green liquid in my belly, moving up and down.

I let it move within me as I moved under the trees swaying in the wind.

Soon, my mom would be the wind.

~

When I came back from those walks, something had shifted.

Grief no longer felt threatening or heavy.

She felt familiar.

Like a piece of me I’d long forgotten.

~

The backlog came soon after.

All the endings I had rushed past.

Graduation.

Moving out, leaving home.

Marriage. Divorce.

I never paused to grieve what I was leaving behind because I was too busy racing towards where I was going.

That Grief didn’t just disappear with time. My body held it, waiting for the safety to resurface.

I didn’t have the language for it then, but something had begun.

Not just grieving.

Unraveling.

Who I thought I was…and meeting what had been quietly waiting underneath.

~

Part IV coming soon.