011: The space grief asks for
Clearing room for what hurts and heals
I didn’t grow up knowing how to grieve. No one taught me how to sit with sorrow, how to let it move through me without turning away. Like many people, I was taught to manage, to explain, to perform resilience. But not to be still. Not to unspool quietly, with gentleness and without a deadline.
When loss came—not just death, but other forms too: the end of a friendship, a country left behind, a career cut short, an identity outgrown—I did what most people do. I tried to stay busy. I added things. Plans. Distractions. Routines. I thought that filling my days might lighten the weight inside.
It didn’t.
I didn’t need advice. I didn’t need noise. I needed fewer things. Fewer tasks. Fewer expectations. I needed space to feel what was gone—and to figure out what still remained.
What began to ease the ache wasn’t something I did. It was what I stopped doing.
I cleared space. I simplified. I began to unburden—not to erase the pain, but to make room for it. I let the grief come in quietly, like fog rolling across a field. And in that stillness, I learned that simplicity is not the absence of sorrow. It is the condition in which sorrow can be fully felt, and gently healed. It is how I moved through the world.
This essay is a meditation on that space—on how the practice of simplicity in expectations, in words, in daily rhythms can offer unexpected shelter in times of grief.
Not to solve it.
Not to rush it.
But to carry it—lightly, humanely, together.
“Grief does not ask for grand gestures. It asks for room.”
Loss has a way of emptying a room. The silence that follows is not just the absence of a voice or presence; it is the sound of your world rearranging itself. After loss, life becomes strangely loud. Notifications still come. Appointments still expect to be kept. The hum of obligation never seems to notice the rupture.
In such moments, the idea of “simplifying” may sound hollow, even callous. How can anyone talk about clarity when the heart is a knot? But I’ve come to believe that it is exactly in these times of grief that simplicity, as ethic, becomes vital.
Simplicity does not ask us to ignore pain. It invites us to sit with it—without adding noise. It asks: What can be let go, so the sorrow can speak?
“Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.”
—Anne Roiphe
The weight of loss
Grief is a weight, but not always a visible one. It arrives as fog, as fatigue, as forgetfulness. Sometimes it looks like rage. Sometimes like silence. It is cumulative, complex, and not always socially acceptable. We are allowed to mourn loudly at funerals, but not when we feel abandoned by someone who is still alive. We are not always taught how to hold a sorrow that doesn’t have a clear name.
In my own experiences, grief has never followed a neat arc. It stutters. It loops. It arrives unannounced months after the fact. The days immediately following loss are often the clearest. Meals arrive. Friends check in. The world briefly makes room. But soon, that room is expected to close again. Return to normal. Move on. Be productive.
And yet, this is precisely the moment when the internal architecture of life is weakest. The scaffolding falls. Grief is not a break in life—it is life, asking to be felt. And it is heavy.