The Holy Ache - Grief

Grief has always felt like a kind of truth-teller to me—unapologetic, ancient, and oddly comforting. In a world shaped by illusion, curated performance, and endless distraction, grief cuts through. It doesn’t care about social roles or productivity. It just arrives. And in its arrival, everything false begins to fall away.

I don’t love grief because I want to suffer. I love grief because it’s honest. Because when it comes, I feel closer to the real. It wipes away the noise and invites what’s essential to rise. In the depths of grief, I remember who I am—not the fractured self shaped by systems of trauma or capitalism, but the soul underneath, the part that can still feel.

Francis Weller writes about the Five Gates of Grief: what we love and lose, the parts of ourselves that were never welcomed, the sorrows of the world, ancestral grief, and the absence of what we needed but never received. These gates don’t open gently. Sometimes they open all at once, and suddenly, we’re submerged—held not just in our own pain, but in the pain of generations, of ecosystems, of the planet. It is overwhelming, yes. But also sacred. Because it is in those moments of unraveling that something luminous begins to emerge.

That’s why space and presence are so vital. Grief must be witnessed. When someone is in the thick of it, they don’t need a solution—they need a companion. Someone to sit in the dark with them and say, “You’re not alone.” This, I’ve come to understand, is the most holy offering we can give each other.

I’ve often felt like a pilgrim in this life—someone wandering between worlds, carrying stories not in words, but in sensations, in dreams, in the quiet vibration of a song at dusk. Maybe I’m here to teach people how to feel again. Maybe I came to teach my father how to feel, to remind him—and others like him—that softness isn’t weakness, that shedding the mask is not failure, but birth.

There is a sacred riddle I carry:

How do I live in this world while no longer living of it?

I walk with that question every day, between fire hydrants and eucalyptus trees, between the noise of modernity and the silence of remembering. It’s not a riddle to be solved, but one to be lived.

If trauma and pain are the hardened mass that keeps us locked in forgetting, then grief is the crack—the soft place where light can pour through. And in that light is beauty. And in that beauty is truth. This is what I want to help others remember: that they are not broken. That they are not just the pain they carry. That even in their sorrow, there is a story worth weaving—a thread of grace hidden in the rubble.

I think I am a weaver.

Not of cloth, but of soul.

I gather the fragments people think are unworthy and help them see the sacredness in the pieces.

I midwife collapse.

I hold the silence until the next poem returns.

I walk with people as they remember the hero in their story—not the victim, not the mask, but the one who lived through it all and came back with fire in their chest.

This is the holy ache I carry.

This is the work of the in-between.

And I am here for it.