What I've Learned Sitting With People in Grief

I used to think grief was something you got through. A door you walked through once, and then you were on the other side of it.

I don't think that anymore.

After fourteen years of holding space for people — on the table, in conversation, in the quiet moments before and after a session — I've come to understand grief differently. It's not a door. It's more like weather. It moves through. It changes shape. Some days it's a fine mist you barely notice. Other days it's a storm that knocks you flat, even years later, even when you thought you'd “dealt with it.”

Here's what I've learned, sitting with people in that weather.

Grief doesn't need to be fixed. So often, people apologise to me — for crying, for “not being over it yet,” for taking up space with their sadness. But grief was never a problem to solve. It's love with nowhere left to go. When someone lets themselves feel it fully, even for a moment, something in their body softens. Not because the grief is gone, but because it's been allowed to exist.

The body remembers what the mind tries to forget. I've worked with people who could talk about their loss calmly, almost matter-of-factly — and then, the moment I placed a hand on their shoulder, they wept. Not because anything was wrong, but because their body had been holding it, waiting for permission to let go, even briefly.

You can be held without being fixed. This might be the biggest one. So much of what we're offered when we're grieving is advice — what to do, how to move forward, what stage we should be in. What I've found people actually need, more often, is simply to not be alone in it. To have someone sit with them in the weather, without trying to change it.

Healing isn't linear, and that's not a failure. I've seen people make enormous progress — and then, on an anniversary, a smell, a song, find themselves right back in it. That's not regression. That's just how grief moves. It loops. It returns. It doesn't mean the healing didn't happen.

You are allowed to be both — broken and becoming. So many of the people I sit with carry a quiet shame, as if grieving means they're somehow failing at life, at resilience, at moving on. But I've never once seen someone's grief and thought less of them for it. If anything, it's often the people who've grieved the deepest who go on to hold the most space for others.

If there's one thing I'd want anyone reading this to take with them, it's this: you don't have to carry it alone, and you don't have to carry it “right.” Grief isn't something to get over. It's something to be held through.

That's the work. That's always been the work.