Some grief moves the way it's supposed to. It comes in waves, gets talked through, gets understood, and, over time, loosens its grip enough that life has room in it again. And some grief doesn't. You can talk about it for years, understand exactly what happened and why it hurts, be able to narrate the whole thing clearly to a therapist or a friend, and still find it sitting in you exactly where it was on day one, untouched by all that understanding.

In many indigenous traditions, grief is understood as the soul's appropriate response to love encountering loss. If you loved something, a person, a relationship, a version of yourself, a way of life, then grief is the price of that love, and it is also the proof of it. To rush through grief is to dishonour the love that caused it. To medicate it into silence is to refuse the very thing that might change you.