I lost my dog this week.
She was one of my greatest loves; and this grief moves strangely.
Not like the storm I thought it would be. But more like a veil, that drapes quietly over ordinary things until even the light in the room feels altered somehow. The body still turns toward familiar sounds. But my spirit reaches yet, for a presence that has slipped beyond the physical world.
And this is my work, my field. So I thought I might integrate it faster, with less missing her physically in our home and more understanding that it’s her body not her, that’s transitioned.
Yet.
There are moments after loss where reality feels thin.
Not broken. Just thinner.
And maybe that feeling has been here for longer than I realized. I only see it now beneath what’s structured on top of it.
I keep circling back to how so much of the world is being built around fear. Around catastrophe and the anticipation of loss.
I am at my core, an equestrian. I know what it feels like when a horse is preparing to give the buck designed to launch you where someone else has to deal with you.
How they set the bit in their teeth, drop their head and you know – know that it’s coming.
It’s coming and you’ve never felt more humanly-weighted to their one thousand pounds in your life.
It feels like we’re living inside that prolonged moment between setting the bit in the teeth and what we know is coming.
So we wake each morning and immediately tether ourselves to suffering happening everywhere all at once. A constant procession of grief moving across glowing screens like one single movement.
Because maybe we can name what’s coming before it arrives.
And then again maybe the nervous system wasn’t made to hold this much.
But then, when in history have human men not done human things to one another?
And we’re still here.
We can feel it in one another, can’t we? See the exhaustion behind our eyes. The way joy arrives with caution as though looking for permission to be celebrated. The way rest itself has begun to be something we don’t recognize.
And yet we move through like the haints collectively haunting ourselves.
And that’s before personal grief enters the room.
Not world-weary grief or collective outrage.
The kind of grief that maybe only the single self in a single life can understand.
The kind that rearranges the air in the house and reveals how deeply love embedded into the smallest rituals. The little unconscious moments. The turning toward. The listening for.
The expectation of presence.
But she doesn’t live in this house anymore.
Loss is strange because it does not ask us to stop living.
We still make tea. Still answer messages. Still move through the machinery of the day while some deeper part of us swims several feet beneath the surface of everything.
Watching.
This is the heart of what so many are carrying right now.
Not only grief over who or what they have loved and lost (I include the self in that), but grief from living too long inside an atmosphere of fear. Grief from witnessing too much. Grief from feeling the world tremble constantly beneath our feet while we drift on pretending not to notice.
And yet…
There is something sacred about grief too.
Not the pain itself. But the evidence within it.
Grief reveals attachment, tenderness. Reveals where love once sat so fully that its open-ended absence now echoes.
And maybe that’s why grief feels holy sometimes.
Because for a brief moment, the veil thins. And we are forced to remember how deeply connected we actually are to one another, to life, to presence, to fleeting things.
Today I am standing at the shoreline of something immense and human and ancient, realizing that almost everyone around us is carrying invisible sorrow too.
Some quietly. Some loudly. Some so long they no longer recognize it as grief at all.
And still our hearts continue.
Still they reach. Still they love. Still our hearts break open again and again despite knowing they will someday lose everything they touch.
There is something almost miraculous in that.
I know it.
I just can’t feel it.
Not today.
