grief is a public service

Allowing + feeling our grief not only supports our own process of healing.

It also brings something essential to our collective life.

Because grief belongs in public + communal space.

It’s necessary.

Grief is about telling the truth + being human.

And pushing down grief (because it’s too painful or scary or vulnerable) often means lying + pretending + denying reality.

It means evading core realities of our human experience like feeling + vulnerability + interconnectedness + uncertainty.

And when there’s no room for grief in public life, no support for processing it collectively, the consequences aren’t great.

Because what do humans do with unprocessed feeling?

We tend to fling it out into the world + project it onto others + assign blame.

We try to control the externals (+ other people) so that we don’t have to feel the feelings that get triggered by circumstances beyond our control.

We refuse to live in ambiguity + uncertainty + nuance and drift toward rigidity + absolutes instead.

Here in the U.S., for instance, there’s been a notable + tragic absence of collective grief through the pandemic, even though the losses have been staggering + devastating.

And we’ve seen the impact of this absence in the form of denials of reality, large-scale refusals to make small changes + sacrifices for the common good, misinformation + conspiracy theories, and blame + hatred toward certain groups of people.

I imagine that if we’d had spaces to feel + process the grief together, we’d be more plugged into our humanity + less afraid of the truth.

We’d be more aware of our tender vulnerability + fierce interconnectedness and more responsive to the hard + painful circumstances of the moment.

So feeling your grief isn’t just for you.

It’s for the world.

It’s not only about healing yourself.

It’s also about bringing that healing + humanity + truth to our collective life.

In this way, grief is a public service.

Because the capacity to feel sorrow + hold uncertainty + allow painful emotions is so often precisely what’s needed to meet the moment, support others, remember community, and step into power.

And when we allow our own grief, we open permission + possibility for others to do the same.

So how might you make room for your grief? How might you welcome it as the healing + truth-telling medicine that it is?