Loss as a Phase of Regeneration

After months of studying death and working in the end-of-life care world, I thought I was prepared for my Grandmother's death. But grief is a tricky thing.

Over the past few years, my life has been shaped by repeated encounters with death and loss.

I’ve watched nine people die in front of me, in public and in real time. I trained to become a death doula and volunteered in hospice. I’ve watched a company I built come to an end. I’ve grieved the collapse of friendships, and the quieter deaths of former lives, careers, and identities. Death has been something I’ve lived through repeatedly, in both literal and symbolic forms.

These experiences gave me language for change and a working understanding of how lives reorganize themselves around endings.

Yet somehow, none of this made me immune to grief.

If anything, it made me aware of how little we are taught about what grief actually is. Long before hospice work or formal training, my education in death began in forests. With fungi. With decay and regeneration occurring so close together they are impossible to separate. Dead material becoming soil. Soil becoming structure. Networks beneath the surface doing the real work long after something visible has ended. What looks like collapse from one angle is often nourishment from another.

Those observations didn’t feel spiritual at the time. They taught me that nothing persists in isolation, and nothing disappears cleanly. Every ending redistributes energy, attention, and relationship.

Photo by Joe Dudeck

What my recent losses revealed was not a gap in my understanding of death, but a fundamental misunderstanding of grief.

I had understood grief as an emotional response. Something that could be processed, integrated, and softened with enough insight, ritual, or preparedness. What I encountered instead was grief as a structural force. Something that moves through an entire life, demanding reorganization rather than resolution.

My grandmother’s death made this unmistakable.

Her death was not sudden. It was, in many ways, a good death. She was surrounded by family, settled into her favorite chair, aware that she was nearing reunion with my grandfather, her partner of nearly seventy years. In the years leading up to her death, I spent a great deal of time with her. I knew she was ready. She’s made it clear that she lived a wonderful life, but 88 years was enough time for her.

And still, when I saw the text just hours after visiting Machu Picchu, I collapsed. I thought we had more time. Time to record her stories, and sit beside her a little longer. Time that existed right up until it didn’t.

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” — C.S. Lewis

Photo by Alfonso Betancourt

Grief, as I now understand it, is not primarily an emotion. It is a reorientation of a web of relationships.

When that web shifts, the suffering is immediately and ongoing. Something is clearly very wrong. Things are different. While the mind is trying to understand how it will survive without that person, that opportunity, that state of being, the body is trying to live inside a world whose structure has completely changed.

This is why grief feels uncontrollable. It doesn’t respond to insight, or wait for privacy. It arrives in the middle of otherwise ordinary moments because those moments are built on an older map of reality. Each time the map fails, the system has to update itself. That updating takes time, repetition, and exposure to the fact that the world has already changed.

What made this especially difficult was how little space there was to acknowledge all of this grief I’ve been carrying. Life continued around me as if nothing fundamental had shifted. Conversations stayed light, plans moved forward. The expectation that I would adjust quietly and keep the space felt exhausting. In the past, I didn’t have language for why this felt impossible. I only knew that pretending things are normal required a kind of disassociation I wasn’t willing to maintain.

The pain comes from that moment of recognition, repeated again and again, as life continues to present situations that assume a stability that is no longer there.

Photo by vadim kaipov

But here’s the thing. If I know one thing to be true about grief, it’s proof that I’m alive. Every bond strong enough to matter leaves an imprint. When that bond changes form, the imprint doesn’t disappear. It has to be carried, integrated into a new way of moving through the world. It’s unavoidable, and I’m tired of running from it.

When a river changes course, the banks erode. Trees fall. Root systems are exposed. The water doesn’t apologize for the disruption, and the land doesn’t demand a return to the old shape. The surrounding systems adjust slowly. Sediment settles where it can. New growth appears where conditions allow. No forcing, no holding back. Nothing insists the change shouldn’t have happened.

The loss is absorbed over time, not erased. In forests, death is rarely discreet. A fallen tree alters light patterns for decades. Fungi spread through what was once solid, breaking it down into forms that can be used again. What looks like decay is actually redistribution of nutrients, energy, and new life.

Human grief follows the same laws.

When someone dies, or life collapses, or an identity can no longer be sustained, the internal landscape shifts. Old paths no longer lead anywhere. Familiar orientation fails. The pain comes from having to live inside that changed terrain while everything else keeps moving. There is no clean moment where the work is finished. The reweaving happens gradually, unevenly, deep within us.

When I found myself driving toward her house yesterday, completely on autopilot, it took far longer than it should have to remember that she wasn’t there. In some ways, she was everywhere, just out of reach but very present in spirit. But there would be no more afternoon chats, discussing wacky inventions we’d both like to make or the newest drama on Greys Anatomy.

This is why grief keeps returning. I wouldn’t say it’s unresolved, because it’s kind of impossible to resolve something so slippery and continuous. Instead, life keeps asking you to stand in new places while you remember what has changed.

And sometimes that sucks! I don’t like remembering the opportunities I loved that ended, or friends I loved but no longer talk to. I remember all my fond memories with my grandmother, while mourning the fact that I won’t be making new ones next week, or next year. It breaks my heart that she won’t be at my wedding. We spent hours talking about my dress and the venue. How is it possible that she will never get to see it happen?

Photo by Pierre Bamin

Once I stopped expecting grief to disappear, my relationship with it changed. I no longer treated its return as failure or regression. I stopped bracing against it and stopped interpreting it as a sign that something had gone wrong. Grief became part of the landscape of my life, something to move with rather than something to defeat.

Grief stretched my sense of time. It placed me inside longer cycles than productivity, momentum, or personal narrative usually allow. It made me less interested in pretending permanence exists and more willing to live honestly inside change. Like the more-than-human world, my life began to follow familiar rhythms of attachment, loss, and return. Nothing about those rhythms is efficient. None of them resolve cleanly. They continue because life continues.

The longer I work in death care, the clearer this becomes. Grief is not something to solve or transcend. It is one of the ways life responds to real connection. When grief is rushed, minimized, or privatized, it turns corrosive. When it is given time, structure, and shared language, it remains painful but becomes livable. An energy to harness, to transmute into purpose of how to live our lives.

As Rumi reminds us, “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” It’s impossible to move through life without getting wounded. But at the same time, that same wound can show us the way.

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Author’s Note

I wrote the majority of this essay directly after my Grandmother had passed. It was deeply cathartic to realize that all the work I’ve done in death care and grief did not absolve me of the heavy love and loss I’m experiencing. And I wouldn’t want it to. Grieving is such a beautiful part of being alive. We humans have the gift of meta cognition, thinking about thinking, where we can try and think ourselves out of things like grief. But I don’t want to get rid of this feeling. I love thinking about my Grandmother when I see a red Cardinal fly past. She is a part of me, and despite the immense pain I’m feeling over never getting to sit with her again in the same way, I invite the grief in.

If you or someone you know is experiencing grief, I gently suggest that you view it like a companion, one that will walk with you through life, nagging you every so often about the love you felt so that person or thing. If you are struggling and need further support:

• For those inside the US, call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline any time; it’s free and confidential.

• Befrienders Worldwide (befrienders.org) lists crisis lines by country.

• For ongoing support, organizations like GriefShare offer structured groups (many are church-based but open to anyone), and The Dinner Party connects people in their 20s–40s with peer-led circles after loss.

There are so many wonderful organizations that are working in the death and grief community. Omaha’s first grief center lifting financial burdens, offering collective for Hope will offer free clinical counseling and therapy when it opens this fall. The Minneapolis brass band bringing joy amid grief: ‘When people see us playing, it gives them hope’ Stories from a professional gravedigger in Asheville NC, grappling with the long term impact of Hurricane Helene.

Photo by Jesse Bauer